Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
My thanks to our witnesses for their extremely enlightening testimony.
There is so much to say and so many questions to ask about the extradition law and the fact it has not been adopted in Hong Kong. In a way, that law has been bypassed by the adoption of a law with much greater scope, the law on national security. It can be applied extraterritorially. In addition, local authorities have every latitude to determine what constitutes a breach of national security. We could potentially come back to the status of the joint declaration treaty and the resignation of the director of public prosecutions. Basically, a whole host of questions may arise.
I would like to continue along the same line of questioning as Mr. Genuis, about the activists leaving and how those departures could be made easier by various Western democracies. Clearly, Mr. Genuis was bringing up the possibility that the Chinese government may respond by a large-scale hostage-taking policy. The possibility has also been mentioned that the Chinese government may well want to prevent the departures.
However, I would like to go back to two of Mr. Rogers' statements that seemed contradictory to me. During his presentation, he seemed to indicate that receiving activists was supposed to be a measure of last resort, leaving a sufficiently large force in place in order to continue the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong. But, when replying to Mr. Genuis, he said that we had to make it possible for activists to leave immediately while there was still time to do so.
I would like to let Mr. Rogers be more specific with his thoughts as to whether we have to welcome militants quickly, which may well have the opposite effect of leaving Chinese authorities with a free hand in tightening their authority over Hong Kong.