Evidence of meeting #9 for Foreign Affairs and International Development in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was human.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Professor of International Law at McGill University, and Former Member of the Board of Directors at Rights & Democracy, As an Individual
Absolutely, sir, yes. The entire board, yes.
Conservative
Jim Abbott Conservative Kootenay—Columbia, BC
Yes, I understand that.
If the board has the responsibility for establishing the policies and direction of Rights and Democracy, it seems to me that a lot of your testimony and the testimony of others has stipulated that in fact the president, past and present, and the staff should be telling the board which direction to be going in, should be establishing the policies. Am I misunderstanding?
Professor of International Law at McGill University, and Former Member of the Board of Directors at Rights & Democracy, As an Individual
No, sir, you're not misunderstanding anything. The staff never told us how to run the organization. We had very vigorous debates in the board. I certainly never felt that the staff were dictating to me. We had a collegial relationship. When we were the majority we had critical discussions. I had many disagreements with Mr. Beauregard, and they were always respectful. I don't think anyone is questioning that.
I began by saying the problem began in the board. It was not a staff and board problem. It was a problem of a minority of a board trying to dominate and eliminate the majority. That was the real problem, which then spilled over into relations with the staff.
I must also add to this suggestion of staff rebellion. When I was at Rémy Beauregard's funeral, one of the staff members came up to me, after this letter was signed by 45 of the 47 staff members calling for the resignation. She told me, “You know, we deal with people in Afghanistan and Congo who risk their lives for what they believe in. We are willing to risk our livelihood for what we believe in.” They knew exactly what the consequences would be of their actions. This means that this isn't just, as Mr. Matas says, “people from the street” who think they own the organization. These are people who put their livelihood at risk. One must consider how extreme the circumstances would have been for them to do that.
If I may also add, on the suggestion that there was some conspiracy to achieve a sort of collective agreement in exchange for 45 of the 47 staff members to sign that letter, well, it's a remarkably creative theory. It's very disturbing, because the source of that accusation is one staff member, that same staff member who has made a complaint now to the syndicate saying he was pressured. What is disturbing is that on the day the director of communications, Charles Vallerand--one of the three managers who appeared before--was dismissed, Mr. Gauthier tried to promote that one staff member to the position of director of communications. If you like, we can discuss the evidence of that. Here we have people being promised a promotion for giving substance to conspiracy theories to smear the staff, to smear the international board members, to smear Mr. Beauregard. So it seems that everyone here is wrong, except those few board members, and I just don't think it adds up.
Conservative
Jim Abbott Conservative Kootenay—Columbia, BC
I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but we have very limited time.
You would be familiar with the tabling of the annual report. The bylaws clearly stipulate that the annual report would be tabled under the name of the chairman. In fact the chairman, as I understand it from correspondence that I've seen, did not receive it, or certainly did not receive a copy of the annual report prior to it being tabled. Yet you're indicating to us, by your testimony, that there wasn't any conflict, there wasn't any difficulty, between the people who were on the staff going ahead and doing their own thing without reference even to the chairman of the board.
You were on the board at that time. You must have had an opinion about that.
Professor of International Law at McGill University, and Former Member of the Board of Directors at Rights & Democracy, As an Individual
Well, yes, I think the chairman had a rather extravagant view of his powers. He thought, for example, that he would have veto powers. The majority of the board approved a grant for a project on indigenous rights in Colombia, and he claimed to have a veto power.
The point is that this report was discussed by the board. I think we have to be cautious about Mr. Braun's assertion that he never saw a copy of it. Maybe he didn't see a copy of the final draft, but we did discuss it, and he was involved in that decision.
Conservative
Jim Abbott Conservative Kootenay—Columbia, BC
But Mr. Akhavan, at the risk of getting into a debate with you, the point I'm trying to make is that the staff members went ahead and were doing things, and constantly did things.
You talk about debate. I agree that there should be a debate at the board level between board members. It strikes me that what you're confirming is that in fact there was a debate between the staff and the board. And the board is in charge.
Professor of International Law at McGill University, and Former Member of the Board of Directors at Rights & Democracy, As an Individual
There wasn't a debate, there was a discussion. For example, we had a five-year strategic plan, which the board has now adopted. We would invite staff members to make a presentation, and we would have discussions with them.
I as a board member never felt that either Mr. Beauregard or the staff thought they could dictate anything to us. But I do think the majority of the board felt that a minority was trying to gain absolute power at the expense of the majority, at the expense of the legitimate powers of the chief executive officer, Mr. Beauregard.
I can give you many incidents of mistreatment of staff members. We had Madam Cynthia Gervais in our Geneva office, who was interrogated, in two conversations with Mr. Gauthier and Mr. Braun, and she resigned shortly thereafter. Everyone knew they wanted to close down the Geneva office irrespective of what the majority thought.
Two staff members were interrogated because of their Middle Eastern backgrounds.
There are many issues we could discuss here about why the staff were so upset.
Conservative
Jim Abbott Conservative Kootenay—Columbia, BC
I respect that this is your testimony, but you are fundamentally confirming that there was a conflict directly between the staff members and the board. I am suggesting that according to legislation and bylaw, the board has the responsibility, for the organization, to give direction to policy to the staff members.
Professor of International Law at McGill University, and Former Member of the Board of Directors at Rights & Democracy, As an Individual
I'm not confirming that. I'm confirming that a minority of board members had a conflict with a majority of board members and the staff.
I would add that board members, under the act, must act in good faith in the best interests of the organization, which is why the majority at one point called for the resignation of the chair, Mr. Braun.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
Thank you very much, Mr. Abbott.
I'm going to move to Mr. Dewar, the last questioner. Seven minutes, sir.
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses. In particular, I want to thank Madam Trépanier for being here today.
To be frank, to be brave enough to come forward is exemplary. You are here to share with us not only the experience of your husband but also some of the facts that we need to know about what happened. So thank you very much for being here.
I'm going to ask you a question around your comments with regard to his fight to have his reputation kept intact. Specifically, you mentioned that there had been an evaluation done without his consultation, and yet there was a verbal consultation with him about his conduct and his performance that was positive.
What did he say? Did he share with you...? Did he give you feedback about that positive verbal overview that was given to him by the board?
As an Individual
Not really. When he came back from that meeting that day, he said that apparently the board went...
May I speak in French?
The board met in camera, having asked all staff to leave. There was a positive evaluation, which Mr. Gauthier himself presented in March. The evaluation was very positive. Thereafter, Rémy learned that another evaluation had been added to his file. It was completely at odds with what he had been told in March 2009. He could not understand. On January 6, Mr. Gauthier gave an explanation, which I heard when I was on the other side of the door. The item was on the agenda. He said that the evaluation had then been redone because the one conducted in March had not been as comprehensive as required. So he completed it subsequently. That is what he said. It was afterwards, when the chair arrived in March, that everything changed.
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
Thank you.
I guess my next set of questions is to you, Mr. Akhavan.
You mentioned—am I getting this right?—that Marco Navarro-Genie had, according to you, actually been hired by the board to do work for the institute.
Professor of International Law at McGill University, and Former Member of the Board of Directors at Rights & Democracy, As an Individual
While Mr. Gauthier was acting president, apparently Mr. Navarro-Genie was hired for a week as a senior adviser for an unspecified amount of money for an unspecified mandate.
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
So while he was a board member, he was hired, as far as you can tell, by Mr. Gauthier to do work.
Professor of International Law at McGill University, and Former Member of the Board of Directors at Rights & Democracy, As an Individual
Yes, sir.
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
Chair, I think it's important for the committee to ask for that document. We've already asked for... I know Mr. Obhrai doesn't want transparency, but we've asked for contracts that had been engaged by the board while Mr. Gauthier was the president, and to date we have not received those.
Is that correct, as far as you know: that we have asked for the contracts for the law firm, for the private investigative firm, for the media firm, which we know was doing hard work when they came to the committee last, and we have not received those?
I would also like us to put a formal request to the board to have the contract of Marco Navarro-Genie, because I was not aware of it.
Mr. Akhavan, are you aware of any instance in which board members were hired to do contracts while they were board members?
Professor of International Law at McGill University, and Former Member of the Board of Directors at Rights & Democracy, As an Individual
No, it would seem self-evidently a conflict of interest for any board member to give a contract to another board member, let alone in these very questionable circumstances.
As I said, I wonder, given the fact that Mr. Navarro-Genie has taken on the campaign of assault against me and international board members, whether this is what he was doing in Montreal that week: going through the thousands of e-mails that the private investigative firms had dug up from Mr. Beauregard's computer to see whether they could find any accusations against us. If my wish to help victims of mass murder in Sri Lanka is the best they can come up with, I'm afraid they're not getting value for their money.
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
I might add, Chair, that it was Mr. Navarro-Genie who, I believe, called this committee and this process a gong show. This is someone who has been hired at taxpayers' expense, as far as we can tell—and we don't know until we get evidence, hopefully soon, from this group that he was being hired at taxpayers' expense—to work for the president. This is highly disturbing and unprofessional and unethical.
I'd also like to know from you about Mr. Gauthier. You said he had been on a trip to China on which other members accompanied him, that It was for five days, and that there was an honorarium or per diem paid to other members for five days, and that this was the amount of work that was done—a five-day billing—but that he had actually stayed over for an extra five or six days and, correct me if I'm wrong, charged more for—
Professor of International Law at McGill University, and Former Member of the Board of Directors at Rights & Democracy, As an Individual
No, that was Mr. Navarro-Genie. Mr. Navarro-Genie had been in Haiti, and he stayed an additional four days on what appears to be personal business, based on the information available to me--I wasn't there--and he charged the honorarium for those days for a total of $1,300. I was looking through the books in December, in part because the board budget was twice what it had been. The board budget had never been twice over, ever.
With respect to Mr. Gauthier, he was on a six-day trip to China in December, together with Mr. Beauregard and others. The others received $500 honoraria, but Mr. Gauthier, based on the records that I saw, charged $3,575, including an additional five days for preparation. Now, Mr. Gauthier has a full-time law practice, and I'm not sure how he would have spent five full days to prepare for a meeting in China in which there were exchanges of pleasantries. I think one needs to look very carefully at all the contracts that have been offered, including the contract that he had given himself; for how many days did he receive payment during the 66 days that he was president?
We have contracts to Borden Ladner Gervais; Deloitte and Touche; Ogilvy Renault; Woods, which is a big law firm in Montreal; Serco Security Systems; Prima Communication; Mr. Auger, who quit after one week as director general, a position that never existed; and Mr. Navarro-Genie.
I've estimated. I used to work in a law firm. Law firm partners Deloitte and Touche charge $500 to $600 an hour. If you add it all up, if you have an average of 1,000 or 1,500 hours, we have half a million dollars spent in just a one-month or two-month period. In times of austerity, when everyone is speaking about wise use of taxpayers' money, for a human rights organization to do that is unthinkable.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
Thank you, Mr. Dewar. That's all the time we have.
I want to once again thank the witnesses for being here today. We're going to change witnesses because we have a couple of others who are coming. Once again, thank you very much.
We're going to take one minute to do that so that we can get right back to the next round. Thanks.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
I'm hoping we can get started. We're running short on time. I don't want to reduce the time for questions and testimony, so we'll give a second for the cameras to leave and then we'll get started.
I want to welcome Mr. Broadbent and Mr. Allmand, both no strangers to this place.
Mr. Broadbent, we'll start with you. You have ten minutes, and then we'll move to Mr. Allmand. Then we'll have a round or two of questions and answers.
Mr. Broadbent, welcome. The floor is yours, sir.
The Honourable Ed Broadbent Former Member of Parliament and Former President of Rights & Democracy (1990-1996), As an Individual
Thank you very much. It's good to be back.
I'm pleased to come before you today, and particularly pleased in that context to see some former colleagues from all parties with whom I enjoyed working when I was a member of the House of Commons.
Unfortunately, the occasion for my appearance is extremely troubling. A unique Canadian institution, Rights and Democracy, is now dysfunctional. According to voices I respect at home and abroad—and I have spent the last three months in London and heard lots about it—it is quickly losing its reputation for integrity and independence.
In my brief comments, I want to say something about the nature and mandate of Rights and Democracy, the roles of the chair and the president, and finally, about the disastrous consequences for the late president, the staff, and the international reputation of the institution that resulted from the actions of a handful of incapable, intolerant, and mean-spirited individuals. In doing this I will be elaborating on the letter that I and three other former presidents of Rights and Democracy sent to the Prime Minister on January 13. Although all four former presidents were Privy Council appointees, the Prime Minister has not yet replied to that letter.
As members know, Rights and Democracy, while created by an act of Parliament, by law functions at arm's length from the government of the day. In its mandate for encouraging human rights and democratic development abroad, there are two points that I want to stress today.
The first point is the emphasis that is found in subsection 4(1) of the act on, first, human rights; and second, the International Bill of Human Rights. This clause makes clear that the agenda for the centre is not to promote our particular form of parliamentary democracy or our charter of human rights and freedoms. This is not a “Canadian imperialism light” mandate.
I would also draw your attention to the crucially important subsection 4(2), identifying what it calls the “major object” of the organization, which focuses not on the political processes of democracy as such but on a crucial objective of the centre; that is, to help reduce the gap between what some states are formally committed to in human rights or in their own constitutions, on the one hand, and on the other hand, what actually takes place within these nation-states.
This wording was brilliantly constructed and became the foundation for so much of the centre's activity in countries such as Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Peru, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Thailand, and Pakistan, all of which had committed in principle in varying degrees to a range of international human rights, but at the same time were failing, at the time of the adoption of the act for the centre, to meet the international standards.
I would emphasize two points here. First, the wisdom revealed in the act is that in broad terms human rights come first. Many states—for example, in Latin America—for a good part of the 20th century had so-called competitive elections, but what they lacked was freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of the press, and the rule of law. Thus, as the broad sweep of western European and North American history has, I believe, shown, the core foundation for a real democracy is a society that embodies universal rights, which now include social and economic rights. Without human rights, so-called elections are a sham; hence the centre, in most but not all of its activities, has supported human rights activists and programs in developing countries.
In partial recognition of this fact—and I suspect most members won't know this, and there's no reason they should—the words “democratic development” were added by amendment to the centre's title in the Senate, not to balance in any way human rights against democracy, but to make it clear that the emphasis on rights is precisely what is involved in democratic development.
I want now to emphasize the importance of Rights and Democracy's reputation for complete independence from the government of the day—an independence that has now been shattered, I believe.
Mr. Mulroney and Mr. Chrétien and their foreign ministers understood this very well. They revealed this understanding by appointing people to the board without a partisan agenda. As we all know, a government can impose a partisan agenda simply by making carefully selected appointments, without any need for explicitly partisan instructions going to the appointees. The previous prime ministers carefully avoided doing this with Rights and Democracy.
Second, they expected Rights and Democracy at times to be in open disagreement with them on international human rights issues. And third, if I may say so, they appointed as presidents people they believed would act in this independent manner.
As president of Rights and Democracy, I openly advocated the inclusion of workers' rights clauses, as outlined in the covenant on economic and social and cultural rights, in all international trade agreements, and the speedy adoption of an international covenant on rights of indigenous peoples. Whether in substance or emphasis, such positions—and on a few other matters—were at variance with the government of the day. At no time did I receive criticism from the Prime Minister or the foreign minister. Indeed, during the 1990s and our activist work on the ground in many developing nations, my staff and I were frequently facilitated in our work by those fine public servants working on human rights issues in our embassies abroad.
In my view, it was because of Rights and Democracy's reputation for knowledge and independence of the government of the day that when I requested a meeting with President Clinton in the White House, or asked for a meeting with the King of Thailand, or with the presidents of Guatemala, Mexico, Rwanda, Eritrea, and Kenya, among others, these requests were granted and the meetings took place. The day Rights and Democracy becomes known not for its independence on rights matters from the government of the day but for supine acquiescence to the party political agendas of the day will be the day that foreign governments and NGOs alike will cease to be interested in the opinions of Rights and Democracy. If they want the Canadian government's view, they will simply call in the Canadian ambassador.
Regarding the roles of the chair and the president, according to the act, the prime purpose of the chair is to preside over meetings of the board as well as to take on other particular duties as might be assigned to him or her. The president, as its chief executive officer, “has supervision over and direction of the work and staff of the centre”.
In plain language, the chair of the board is not the CEO of the organization. It's the president who has and exercises the power of the CEO. When the board of the centre makes its decision on broad policy directions and major grants, it is then up to the president, in his responsibility for the day-to-day operations of the centre, to hire and supervise the staff and to make other decisions required to implement those objectives. The staff, notably the management team, are responsible to him and to no one else. Neither the chair nor any other member of the board has a right to impinge or encroach upon the president's authority to deal directly with the staff.
Early in 2009, when Mr. Braun became chair of the board, he came to an organization in a very good state of morale. Within the previous year it had not only received an excellent annual report on efficiency from the Auditor General, but in addition passed with commendation a five-year review conducted by the Department of Foreign Affairs. Its recent program on women's rights in Afghanistan had been singled out for praise by CIDA. In short, it's a matter of public record, not opinion, that under Mr. Beauregard's presidency, the management and staff were operating efficiently, transparently, and responsibly.
In contrast, after the arrival of Mr. Braun as chairman, to use the word he wrongly applied to the staff, it is the board itself that has become dysfunctional, has embraced a culture of dogmatism, and that lacks transparency.
I would add that it has also been since the arrival of Mr. Braun that the board of Rights and Democracy has lost two of its distinguished foreign members, one by resignation and the other failing to get reappointment; has been criticized by the International Federation for Human Rights; was criticized by William Schabas, the distinguished Canadian head of the Irish Centre for Human Rights; and, to complete the ignominious list, has had its judgments contradicted for the first time ever by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
In responding to questions about these matters, I will be very happy to elaborate.
In the course of all these developments, and following the tragic death of the president, Mr. Braun is probably the first chair of a public institution in Canadian history to have inherited a highly praised management team, as well as an exceptionally educated and dedicated staff, and then, by extraordinary mismanagement, united them in virtual unanimity in a vote demanding his resignation. If ever there was a cause for the dismissal of a public appointee on the grounds of gross incompetence, this is it, and I hope this committee will recommend it. I have never, to my knowledge, ever before called for the public dismissal of a public official. I am doing so today.
If I may, on a personal note, I'd like to conclude by saying something about a key member of the management team who has been singled out for particular criticism by some members of the board. Marie-France Cloutier has worked over 19 years for the centre, the first six for me, in a senior position, throughout my term as president. In all my years of public life, I never met a more competent or more loyal subordinate. She was a loyal employee, but she never hesitated to speak truth to power. That such a fine person and public servant was so arbitrarily dismissed says more about those who now run the centre than it does about her.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
Thank you, Mr. Broadbent.
We're now going to move over to Mr. Allmand for ten minutes.
The Honourable Warren Allmand Former Member of Parliament and Former President of Rights & Democracy (1997-2002), As an Individual
Mr. Chair, members of the committee, I want to first thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today, respecting this important issue.
As you know, I served as president of Rights and Democracy from 1997 to 2002. Furthermore, I was a member of Parliament in 1988, when the centre was established by an act of Parliament. Today I want to speak about the mandate of the centre, its independence, how that independence was exercised during my mandate, its accountability and transparency, the relationship between the president and the board, and the relationship between the centre and the government. I will also comment on how much of this has changed since March 2009, with the appointment of several directors, including Aurel Braun as the chair of the board.
The mandate of the centre is set out in section 4 of the law. In a nutshell, it is to defend and promote democracy and human rights, and in particular those rights set out in the International Bill of Human Rights. In other words, the governing imperative for the centre is the International Bill of Human Rights. The governing imperative is not the foreign policy of Canada, it is not the foreign policy of the United States, and it certainly is not the foreign policy of Israel. The centre is directed by law to be totally independent in pursuing that mandate and pursuing that governance imperative.
Rights and Democracy therefore carries the flag of human rights. It doesn't carry the flag of Canada, the United States, or Israel. It has the mandate to monitor and condemn human rights violations as it sees them anywhere in the world, including Canada. In this respect, the centre is to act independently, at arm's length with respect to all governments and all political parties. This is set out in various ways in the Rights and Democracy statute and bylaws.
According to section 22, the centre is not an agency of Her Majesty. That's the government. Section 23 states that the chair or the president or the directors are not part of the Public Service of Canada. Section 19 indicates that the head office shall be in Montreal, not in Ottawa, where you have the head of government. Section 28 states that the centre was to receive committed five-year funding to ensure its independence. Furthermore, in appointing the Canadian directors, the minister must consult with the leader of the opposition and the leader of every other recognized party in the House of Commons. In addition, in appointing the chair and the president, the minister must also consult with the existing board of directors, once again to ensure the centre's independence and the pre-eminence of its mandate.
When Joe Clark, a Conservative minister, appointed Ed Broadbent, a New Democrat, as the first president in 1990, he set an example for this principle of independence. He appointed a person not of his party whom he knew as a champion of human rights. Once appointed, Ed's governance imperative was the International Bill of Human Rights, not the policies of the Government of Canada, not the policies of the NDP.
Of course, the purpose of this independence is that it gives credibility to the centre, credibility in dealing with other governments, credibility in dealing with international bodies, and credibility in dealing with other human rights organizations. The principle of independence, in turn, is reinforced by the UN Paris Principles, by the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, and by the Vienna Declaration on Human Rights of 1993, which states: “The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis.” In other words, you don't pick and choose, supporting some rights here and other rights there, or varying the enforcement of human rights from country to country.
How was this independence exercised during my mandate as president? Of course we had people on the board who came from different professional, social, ethnic, religious, and political backgrounds. But when they came to the board, they were committed to the mandate of the centre and acted as such in their decision-making. There were times when we differed with the government of the day and we criticized their policies, as we did with respect to the WTO, the Inter-American free trade zone, the ratification of the American Convention on Human Rights, and the implementation of economic, social, and cultural rights, including the right to water and the right to food.
However, despite these public differences and criticism, there was no attempt to silence us, to pack our board with other points of view or to threaten funding cuts. We did consult with each other on issues, but when there was a disagreement, the government accepted that as part of the game that results when you have independent human rights organizations.
On the other hand, there were times when governments, including Canada's, backed the same policies as we did. And then we worked together to have these policies implemented. This was the case with the International Criminal Court, the optional protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflict, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Inter-American Democratic Charter, and others.
It is absolutely clear, Mr. Chairman, gentlemen, and ladies, that what has been happening since March 2009 is totally inconsistent with the traditions I have referred to, totally inconsistent with the statute and bylaws of Rights and Democracy, with its stated mandate and its requirement of independence. It is evident that since a certain date in 2009, the government has been packing the board with individuals whose principal concern is to shield Israel from all criticism, whether deserved or not, which is also the policy of the Harper government and the Netanyahu government.
These individuals—now seven, including the chair—come to the board with biases against the UN, against the UN Human Rights Council, and against human rights NGOs, and a bias with respect to the Middle East conflict. The evidence for these biases is found in their own written articles and statements, in their associations and partnerships, and in their actions and history. If you read the long statement by David Matas in Ezra Levant's blog of January 24, it confirms exactly what I am saying.
When we speak of partnership, we are not talking about Conservative Party membership. We are talking about political biases that are similar to the Harper government's and that are contrary to the centre's mandate, contrary to the International Bill of Human Rights, and contrary to the Vienna Declaration. While it is normal in a free society for political parties to have such biases, it is not acceptable for Rights and Democracy, which has a legislated mandate to monitor and advocate for human rights wherever it is necessary to do so.
In this case, the three grants to Middle East NGOs were authorized under the urgent action fund. Mr. Braun and his colleagues have said, contrary to substantial evidence, that the issue at Rights and Democracy is not with policy, not with the Middle East, but with respect to accountability and transparency.
But the urgent action fund and its budget, and all programs and budgets of Rights and Democracy, are approved each year by the board of directors. They are audited each year by the Auditor General's department. The audited reports are printed in the annual reports, which are tabled in Parliament, posted on the website, and distributed widely. In turn, the president and officers of Rights and Democracy are subject to oversight by this parliamentary committee regarding the annual report and the audited financial statements, which has been done on many occasions.
In addition, the Rights and Democracy statute requires that every five years there must be an independent, in-depth evaluation of Rights and Democracy. These have been done in 1993, 1998, and 2003. None of these five-year evaluations and none of the annual Auditor General audits has ever indicated that the centre was operating contrary to or outside its mandate, or that the urgent action fund, the office in Geneva, or even the attendance at the Durban conference in 2000 were out of order.
According to the Rights and Democracy statute and bylaws, the role of the board is to provide general policy direction, to approve the annual budget and work plan, and to oversee their implementation. It is not the role of the board to micromanage the centre. According to the statute and bylaws, the president has the responsibility to administer and run the centre, including the hiring and management of the staff. The president is full-time, the board is part-time.
The recent actions of the chair and the board of directors to repudiate grants, close the Geneva office, freeze the urgent action program, fire employees, gag and manage staff, and question religious affiliations were all prompted by their political biases, and not by their obligation under the statute to govern in accordance with the International Bill of Human Rights. This can also be said of the attempt in 2009 by Messrs. Gauthier, Tepper, and Braun to rewrite and change Mr. Beauregard's evaluation.
In conclusion, in order to strengthen the centre's independence, I want to make the following recommendations.
First, there should be an outside, independent inquiry into the situation at Rights and Democracy. I appreciate the hearings this committee is conducting; they are worth while, but they are too short and incomplete to really get to the bottom of things.
Secondly, I think you should consider amending the act to strengthen the nomination process.
Third, you should reintroduce the policy of multi-year funding, which was there in the first place but was forgotten about afterwards. The multi-year funding gave more independence to the centre.
Mr. Chairman, Rights and Democracy plays an important role for both Canada and the world. What has happened to it recently is totally unacceptable. Since Rights and Democracy is the creation of Parliament, it's Parliament's responsibility to correct the damage as quickly as possible.
Thank you.