Good afternoon, and thank you for your testimony here today.
I want to follow up on MP Laverdière's question by digging down a little deeper into the implications of expanding the scope of SEMA from beyond its “grave breach of international peace and security”, as it now exists, into what is more of, let's say, a global Magnitsky-type framework. In particular, if we were to amend SEMA to include human rights violations, how would we be looking at defining them?
Is there an agreed international definition or some yardstick for gross human rights violations? What range of abuses might be captured? Are there concerns around thresholds being either too high or too low, and as you just mentioned, around basically setting up Canada to have calls for us to be looking to prosecute all over the world based on whether it would be in the public interest or that of other countries?
Tell us what success looks like. How do we define this in a way that is going to have some teeth to achieve the results we're looking for, which is constraining, and to a certain extent, punishing gross human rights violators? Also, how do we not wind up again with this theory of unintended consequences, where we're opening ourselves up to be constantly deflecting requests from all over the place to implement and act on these laws?
That's for whichever one of you wants to start. You can both have a go.