Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for your testimony today. More importantly, thank you for your courage and ongoing advocacy in the face of great difficulty.
Before I get into questions, Mr. Chair, I want to give the committee notice that this week I intend to move motions with respect to the independent investigation of allegations of genocide against Tamils in Sri Lanka at the end of the civil war, and also a motion with respect to the listing of the IRGC as a terrorist entity under the Criminal Code. I wanted to give the committee information about that.
Back to the testimony here, there are two questions I want to ask. I'll put those out there and let whoever wants to respond to do so. We can go through them that way.
The first question is for Mr. Kara-Murza. You spoke about “political and religious prisoners”, which is different terminology from what we sometimes use in this area.
Can you share a bit more with the committee about the anatomy of religious persecution in Russia, the co-opting of the Orthodox Church and the challenges faced by religious minorities such as Muslims, evangelical Christians and others, and how that should work its way out in our specific response to those issues?
Secondly, on the issue of Magnitsky sanctions, it's clearly an important tool in the government's tool box, but it is only as good as it is used. Some points were made about the people we need to add to our sanctions list.
I'd like to hear your thoughts more broadly at a policy level.
What can we do as Parliament to ensure that this tool is used more often? There are some terrible human rights abusers in the world, none of whom have been listed yet under the Magnitsky act, and there's clearly a need for more people to be listed.
Is there a change in mechanism that can strengthen our use of that tool? Are there things that we can do as Parliament to more effectively ensure that the minister or the government of the day isn't, let's say, holding off on sanctioning people who should be sanctioned?