We have been approached by many families who have loved ones not only in the United States but elsewhere. The only point I want to make here is that when you look at some of the provisions that are in the bill.... There are two that I'll mention. One of the criteria is whether the offender has accepted responsibility for the offence for which they have been convicted, and a second is whether the offender has cooperated or undertaken to cooperate with law enforcement.
In the abstract you might say that's great, that we really want to know this. But the danger here is that this provision is going to be used to assess the patriation of people who come not only from the United States, but from all the other countries that are listed. As you know, there are countries all over the world in which at times the vigorous assessment of your presumption of innocence.... I want you to imagine that it's possible out there in the world that there would be some wrongful convictions. If somebody is asserting his or her innocence, then the minister could consider that as being an inappropriate way, for example, of cooperating, of recognizing the harm.
This is dangerous, because we recognize that elsewhere in the world at times this has been used to oblige people to plead guilty, and we have reports of pressure being made in that regard. It is similar with cooperating with law enforcement in cases in which there is torture or bad treatment or in which people are being discriminated against because they are foreigners, or because they are gay, lesbian, and so on. It is a dangerous thing to ask them to cooperate with law enforcement when they can be treated badly and beaten up in prison because they have done so.
So in a way, I think we're concerned that in some of the criteria we may endanger the lives of some people who are incarcerated in a range of countries, and that range of countries will continue to expand and includes countries where I think the rule of law is well observed and other places where people might have concerns about the way it's been applied.
Our concern is that we think it's premature for this bill to be looked at, since it is in front of the court right now. We consider that it does not meet the objective that it sought to enforce and simply that it may indeed be dangerous in some of the criteria it uses.
That is the end of our presentation. Thank you very much.