Yes, yes, but you know, that's how they do their judiciary system. So do we go into that country and say that with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada—in other words, our modern way of looking at things—we insist that a person be in a six-foot by ten-foot cell on their own, not even with another person? This debate is coming up on some of the prisons in Alberta. So do we insist that we have this, that we have western-style meals? What is being construed here as cruel and unusual treatment or punishment? This can literally go on and on.
Then we get into the issue here that we want to order the Minister of Foreign Affairs to go into that country to give protection to this person who is under the judiciary of that country, who is serving or doing or is incarcerated. But the Minister of Foreign Affairs, because it's not up to Canadian standards, it's not up to snuff in Canada, is ordered to go into that country and to interject, to protect that Canadian. How is he going to protect that Canadian in that jail? Once again we have the great difficulty here of how we enact such a motion. Or is this motion meaningless? I mean, do motions have any meaning? Do bills have any meaning? Or are they not supposed to be taken seriously? If we take this motion seriously, it's an impossible thing to do. It affronts every article. I'll carry on here in a second. But so far it's affronted every article that I've gone through. It makes it just absolutely impossible to be able to consider that this motion could be taken seriously.
We'll leave off with article 12, subject to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment, and go on to number 13, which states:
A witness who testifies in any proceedings has the right not to have any incriminating evidence so given used to incriminate that witness in any other proceedings, except in a prosecution for perjury or for the giving of contradictory evidence.
These articles here are Canadian-made and Canadian-built for Canadians in Canada. To expect that you can have the niceties of this in countries around the world, in Iran, in Iraq... We could literally go up and down the countries of the world. Some day I'd like to know from my colleague the names of those countries that he has and what he would think of whether these would be applicable to any one of those countries.
It would be presumptuous even to look at a Western type of country here and ask if this would be applicable in the United States, for example. The argument could be made by many Americans that this is a Canadian constitution. It is not the American constitution, and quite frankly while they would probably like to help us out and say that, yes, we think it conforms to some of the American constitutional provisos, this is a Canadian constitution, and they might be affronted by us, insisting that the foreign affairs minister adhere to the letter and the dotted i and the crossed t of the Canadian Constitution in an American scenario. Even there, it could be problematic. Certainly to send in the foreign affairs minister, ordering him to provide the letter of protection of the Canadian Constitution in the United States, I can well imagine what the response to that just might be from Washington.
Once again, we're going through article by article on this.