We spent a lot of time in this committee discussing the notion of gross human rights violations. I want to reflect on that a little bit.
In your opening remarks, you addressed using the UN and multilaterals as a more effective way of being able to gain effective sanctions with more teeth globally. You also have a background in the International Criminal Court. Can you comment more generally?
We're seeing a diminishing of power in some of those institutions. Lately we've seen a number of countries step away from the ICC, or at least threaten to step away from the ICC. We're seeing problems at the UN, certainly at the Security Council level. Let's take Syria and Russia as illustrative examples.
If there was agreement and we were able to work with like-minded allies through existing multilaterals, that would be an easier and potentially more effective way of not having to deal with it singularly or singularly with like-minded allies, who might have similar legislation.
Can you think ahead or look ahead or maybe gaze into the crystal ball a little? How do you see this happening? Are these complexities, and the withdrawal from some of the multilaterals, likely to impact this moving forward? If so, is it incumbent on countries like Canada, countries that want to be able to oppose things like gross human rights abuses, to be looking to have more informal groupings of countries that share these sorts of values and have their own domestic sanctions regimes?