Yes, thank you. I apologize for not being fluent in French. I can understand a little bit, but I would probably slow things down. It's too bad that out in western Canada we don't have the opportunity to speak French as much as people do in Ottawa and Quebec.
In any event, yes, you've put your finger on a very important part of democratic development generally, and judicial education in particular. Of course, half of the world's population are women, and nowhere in the world do women enjoy equality with men. That's a very important issue.
There are all sorts of cultural differences, of course, in different places in the world, and that fact has to be taken into account.
But there is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees equality, and all of the other international human rights instruments reflect that notion. Canada certainly stands for that principle. In my work, part and parcel of any project is the awareness that one has to instill the importance of gender equality.
This is often not an easy task. I was talking earlier about resistance. That whole notion of the subordination of women is definitely a pocket of resistance. It's something that some like to suggest is cultural and should be kept that way.
However, I think that in most countries, and I'll use Vietnam again as my example.... It's not a country that historically has championed gender equality, but now they are realizing that women are integral to the success of the economy and of families, that the worth and the importance of the family have to be considered in a holistic way, in a realization that women are being educated, are taking their place in the public domain, and that the society has to respond in appropriate ways so that the families can thrive under those circumstances.
So yes, absolutely integral to judicial education programs has been consciousness-raising about the reality of women's lives. Violence against women has been a very important component—and the access to justice issues: that women, by and large in most countries of the world, do not have access to justice. That engages issues such as legal aid; such as awareness of the judiciary about who isn't in front of them in the courtroom, and why they aren't, and how you bring them in to hear from them; issues in terms of family law and support for women, the support for children. All of those issues are things that are integrally incorporated into judicial education programs.
It used to be, at the beginning, that the focus was almost entirely on social context issues and on gender equality. As I said, as time went on, it became evident that there were many other facets, such as the administration of the courts, the procedures involved in cases. All of these things that support the judiciary needed to have the assistance as well. But what we've always held as a fundamental value is that everything should be looked at through the lens of equality, so that even procedures—I shouldn't say “even” procedures—can be very weighted against certain ethnic groups, or minority groups, or women, so that they don't even get access.
That is an integral component, and I think CIDA now recognizes that in its funding requirements: that it be the lens that any funding for this type of work has to take into account.