Mr. Chair, I want to echo the sentiments expressed earlier: that this is the kind of issue on which we must work together in common cause. As a result, I have had the pleasure of working with the Minister of Foreign Affairs. He has been seized of this issue almost from the point of his inception as minister. He has helped to initiate and bring into being important sanctions, both with respect to the nuclear threat and with respect to the human rights threat.
If I had any recommendations to make—I have made them to the minister and I have made them publicly, and we continue to discuss them—they would be threefold. As I say, it is not to detract from the important and sustaining work that the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the department have continued to do, and the parliamentary secretary as well.
They would be threefold. One, I continue to believe that we need to sanction the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps by listing them as a terrorist entity. They are at the epicentre of the fourfold Iranian threat: nuclear, incitement, terrorists, massive domestic repression.
Two, I think we need to expand our human rights sanctions. As I say, I commend the government for making a beginning with respect to these sanctions, but we need in particular to begin to sanction those in the Iranian legal system—the prosecutors, the judges, et cetera—who are responsible for this massive assault on human rights. We have been sanctioning particularly with regard to those involved in the nuclear threat; I think we need to sanction more with regard to those involved in the massive human rights violations, particularly within the legal system and particularly those at the apex of that legal system.
Finally in that regard, another recommendation I made to the minister—and I close on this—is that given the state-sanctioned incitement to hate and genocide, a standing violation of the genocide convention, I think it would behoove Canada to take the lead morally, politically and legally and initiate an inter-state complaint against Iran, which is a state party to the genocide convention, before the International Court of Justice and hold its leadership to account.