Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, members of the committee.
As President of the International Centre for Criminal Law Reform, I thank you for inviting the international centre today to share with you our experience in China and to comment on human rights and their evolution in China in the 20th century.
I will give my presentation in English. Afterwards, I will be pleased to answer your questions.
Mr. Chairman, the international centre has tabled a brief for your information and your consideration. It attempts to summarize our activities in and with China over the last 13 years, with a particular focus on human rights, rule of law, and criminal justice issues.
I have been personally involved in the centre's work during those years, and I have to tell you it's been a tremendous experience and learning curve that I've gone through.
Like many Canadians, I thought--way back in 1985, when I first went there--how could you ever possibly bring the kinds of values and things we believed in into this kind of an environment? At the outset, though, let me acknowledge that our involvement in engaging with our Chinese interlocutors, although it's been fruitful and quite an experience, has been complex and at times frustrating because of the difference in language--not being able to speak Mandarin on our part and not being able to speak French or English on their part--although as time has gone on we have been able to try to remedy some of those difficulties on both sides. So dialogue requires communication to be possible--at least in the form of good interpretation or speaking the same language--especially when it comes to human rights.
We all recognize, including our Chinese counterparts that we've met, that there are real human rights issues in China that still need to be addressed, despite all the progress that's been talked about. At the same time, what we see is a sincere and motivated interest by the Chinese we have worked with--as has been mentioned by previous speakers--who want to work in this field and want to see these changes brought about because they do not want a repetition of what their parents or their grandparents went through. They thereby want to see efforts to bring about greater respect for the rule of law and human rights.
Obviously, not everyone will agree about what these terms mean, even in our country sometimes, and, as Professor Potter has noted in his comments, even more so in the Chinese context. Based on our experiences, we believe that engagement with our Chinese counterparts in fact works reasonably well, but it needs to be enhanced and continued.
Engagement--since this word is being tossed around--means many things to different people. It's better than ignoring; it's better than repressing; and it's a form of accommodation. But engagement--and the kind of engagement such as the law reform projects we have been working on--can be viewed and should be viewed as an important element within the broader framework of Canada's foreign policy and development aid cooperation efforts.
It's my view, for what it's worth, that the Canadian objective, in terms of what we do in China, is to support legal and judicial reform as a step towards improving human rights on the basis that it's better to be in the tent and supporting than outside and objecting. Legitimate criticism, however, must be made.
First, let me say a word about the centre to give you some context. The centre was created in 1991 as an independent, not-for-profit institutional organization in Vancouver. It's officially affiliated with the United Nations under a formal agreement between the Government of Canada and the United Nations. Our mandate is quite broad-based, including the promotion of human rights, the rule of law, democracy, and good governance, and particularly to make every effort to assist those who are interested in implementing international standards, and not just international human rights standards.
We've had 17 years of experience in criminal justice reform, and we've worked in many countries, but our most significant contribution, I think, in my own mind, because I've been so closely associated with it, is the long-standing program of engagement and support to the legal judicial justice reform process in China, particularly in terms of institutional and capacity building.
When did that start? We began our pioneering and groundbreaking work in 1995, with the launch of the China-Canada criminal justice cooperation project. We started working with academic institutions, as others were doing, but in fact in the criminal justice area we were the first ones.
We were funded by the Ford Foundation, and part of the funds came from the Canadian International Development Agency, in order to provide expert input to assist the Chinese in taking a look at what it meant to apply human rights standards to their country situation, in terms of trying to amend their criminal procedures, their criminal laws, and the way they provided and wanted to provide international covenant standards.
In 1997 our program was renewed for another three years. We had a new partner besides the two academic institutions, which included the China Prison Society. They were to look at the issues that were going on in human rights in prisons, and in particular how to keep the level of incarceration down by looking at how Canadians did community corrections, if I can put it that way.
Then we moved on and had another life, if you will, in 2000, in ratification and implementation of human rights covenants. And then finally, from 2003 until last summer, we had a four-year program of implementing international standards in criminal justice.
Separate and apart from that particular program, we worked on legal aid. We were the ones who were asked by the Chinese if we would help them look at the legal aid systems of other countries and help them develop a national legal aid program. We did that, and as a result of that work, the Canadian Bar Association and IBM Canada, with CIDA as the executing agency, are implementing a legal aid system in China that has a huge number of legal aid clinics throughout the country--in the hundreds of thousands of cases that are now being dealt with. Numbers are staggering when you're dealing with the Chinese situation compared to our modest Canadian way of doing business.
Finally, we did a large program, and we are continuing that program right now, working with the Chinese prosecutors. As one of the key agencies in China, we are helping them with professionalization, capacity building, and developing new ways of having the Supreme People's Procuratorate respect international covenants and combat crime.
As has been alluded to by some of the previous speakers, we know the history of legal and judicial development in China. We have seen the amendments from the mid-1990s and since the March 2004 constitutional amendments, which enshrined--be careful with “enshrined”--the human rights as a constitutional principle. It's not the same kind of enshrinement as we have in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms or in our Constitution, but it does at least go a long way, in comparative terms, towards recognizing that it's something that should be done and respected.
In fact, from what we can see from the people we're working with, the Chinese government is making international human rights standards a priority as one way to help China assume its place in the community of nations in the 21st century. However, they have lots of problems, and with the free market economy, public corruption, economic crime, computer crime, narcotics trafficking, all of these things are becoming more prevalent than they were 20 or 30 years ago, or even 10 years ago. It's a big obstacle in some respects to implementing the recently enacted legal and judicial reforms, which they are working on.
Corruption has now become the number one priority for the Supreme People's Procuratorate. In our project, in supporting their work, we have been doing all kinds of information exchange, study tours, and providing them with different approaches on how to deal with the two aspects of corruption--the prevention side as well as the enforcement side. Much needs to be done on the prevention side. The prevention side needs a lot more work.
I think it would be important for me to mention some of the significant reforms that we have seen take place, which we feel we have been able to influence in some way. The improvements to the death penalty review system, which have caused a significant reduction in the number of capital punishment cases, have been quite extraordinary. As far as the numbers go, they count one way, Amnesty International counts another way, and we can count other ways as well. The death penalty still exists, but the numbers and the kinds of cases for which it's being used have been reduced.
Increased protection of the rights of the accused in pre-trial investigations with the new supervisory powers of the procurators, the prosecutors over the police, are quite significant. The introduction of anti-torture rules, exclusionary rules of evidence, and the videotaping of interrogations--I've witnessed them myself--are quite impressive. Perhaps some of our police could go as far. You can't do everything, but you do most of them.