Bonjour.
My name is Aurel Braun and I'm the chair of the board of Rights and Democracy. Please allow me to say a few words about myself by way of introduction. I am a professor of international relations and political science at the University of Toronto, where I have held the highest academic rank of a full professor for more than two decades.
My interest and expertise in human rights and democratic development go back decades, and my willingness to take on the position of chair of Rights and Democracy has also been influenced by my background. I came to this country as a young boy with my parents in the early 1960s. My parents had been victims of right-wing extremism--Nazism--and of left-wing extremism--communism.
One of my books, in fact, is about extremism and the danger that both right-wing and left-wing extremism pose to human rights and democracy. As a child growing up in a neo-Stalinist state from which my parents brought me to Canada, I could sense the perniciousness of an extreme system in which merely asking questions was deemed to be subversion. Canada, however, gave me every opportunity to grow, and whatever I have achieved, I owe to this country.
The profound sense of fairness that characterizes Canadian culture has always been an inspiration, and joining Rights and Democracy seemed to be an opportunity to give something back and express my gratitude. Sadly, however, the current situation, which you've seen in the press and elsewhere, reminds me of the great liberal writer, George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm. The late Orwell must be ruefully smiling from the grave at what he is hearing.
The situation we've encountered in the past couple of months is truly Orwellian. If I had known fully what I was getting into, I would never have agreed to be chair of the board of Rights and Democracy. It was as if I'd been invited to attend a conference and was asked to get some papers in a back room, only to discover there land mines instead.
Let's begin with the obvious. You have been hearing all these months two completely incompatible versions of reality. In the situation of “he says, she says”, wise people avoid jumping to conclusions, because they do not know whom or what to believe. I urge you to believe no one, including me, before checking the documentable facts. By checking the documented evidence, a fair and objective person can know who is the arsonist and who is the firefighter.
Let's begin with what many of us can agree on. Rights and Democracy is a dysfunctional organization. Becoming a dysfunctional organization can be decades in the making. For this reason, you should not believe the words of ex-presidents any more than you should take at face value what I have to say. My view of Rights and Democracy is that it was seized by a culture of dogmatism, a rejection of accountability, and a lack of transparency.
But I wish to point to the facts. The first type of verifiable fact involves actual facts about impropriety and sponsorship. The organization has spent, as we've heard, about $3.5 million in subsidies. We don't know where all of this money has gone. We do know that far too much of it has gone to terrorist front organizations that pretend to be human rights organizations, notably Al-Haq, in certain ways a front for the terrorist organization PFLP.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars have gone to the Geneva-based office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which is the secretariat of the disreputable UN Human Rights Council, an organization whose conduct has been characterized by the UN Secretary-General himself as totally unacceptable.
Thousands of dollars have gone to a Cairo conference organized with the inclusion of Hezbollah, an organization deemed terrorist under the laws of Canada and other democracies.
The second type of verifiable fact involves senior staff's disregard of due process and elementary fairness. Days after the passing of President Beauregard, the senior staff, as we heard, rushed to sign a collective agreement with their own union without even informing the board. It very much appeared that the purpose of the rushed collective agreement in January 2010 was to give unionized staff taxpayer money in exchange for the union's backing for the senior staff campaign to obscure that senior staff's long history of dogmatism and rejection of accountability.
Elementary fairness will also require the senior staff to be honest about who signed the famous letter of protest and who actually wrote it. Certainly the letter claiming unanimity was not signed by everyone on January 11, 2010. Days later, senior staff rushed around coercing employees to provide their signatures after the letter had already been written and sent. Further, elementary fairness would require the staff not to misuse the passing of the president to serve their personal agendas. It is true that the board and the president did not always agree, but it is a verifiable fact that the president took the side of the board, not the senior staff, at the all-crucial board meeting of January 7, 2010.
The third type of verifiable fact involves the disregard by the senior staff of their obligation to protect confidential information. By this I mean that staff had an obligation to guard computers so that information about Rights and Democracy's anonymous staff in war zones like Afghanistan would never leave the offices. Instead, a number of computers with sensitive information disappeared mysteriously without third-party confirmation that there was a break-in.
Furthermore, it seems that senior staff gave the widow of Mr. Beauregard his computer, with all its sensitive information, even though she had neither the right nor the clearance to receive such information.
In conclusion, please allow me to note again that dysfunctional organizations can take decades to become that way. Fair-minded people withhold judgment about who is telling the truth until they can get verifiable, documented evidence. We are here to present the facts. We have discovered the problems. We did not create them. We, as volunteers, have given our time and have made major sacrifices in order to ensure that Rights and Democracy fulfills its mandate to enhance human rights and promote democracy and that it acts in a fashion that is congruent with the good conscience of the Canadian people.
Thank you for inviting us.