It's a very sad situation. It has its deep roots in history in terms of the situation of the Crimean Tatars in the forties, with forced deportation from Stalin, and then their eventual mass return to Ukraine post-1991.
The current situation is as you read it. It's easy to read terrible stories. It's a story of suppression and pressure. Many of the committee members here met Gennadii Afanasiev in the fall, a young man who was a photographer and a student who organized a small demonstration in Crimea. He was abducted, sent into the Russian prison system, charged with all sorts of offences, and tortured into writing confessions against his fellow citizens.
We believe that's what is happening now. As you mentioned in your question, many people have voluntarily left. They're proactively leaving because they're afraid of what might happen to them. There are people there, doing what they can in a repressive regime.
I think for all of us, it's the new front of human rights. We're watching Russia's approach to human rights live on the ground in Crimea. It's not good. It has religious, ethnocultural, and racial implications.
What can Canada do? I think, as you said, it's strong statements from our government, by our parliamentarians. As in the previous question, it's not accepting Crimea as part of the Russian Federation, which is sanctioning people who claim to be members of Parliament from that region; supporting further clampdowns on travel to that region; and putting pressure on Russia because Russia claims that Crimea voted in an alleged referendum to be part of the Russian Federation. We can see engagement with Russia as part of that process in terms of putting pressure in the Crimean situation, and in any engagement with Russia, we need to bring up the human rights situation in Crimea, because they are the current, alleged authorities there and have responsibility.
I think, thanks to Mr. Afanasiev and dozens of others, there are very good lists online in the newspapers of who exactly has been arrested, where they're being held. We're working with Amnesty International and other human rights groups to free them, to publicize their cases, and to really put pressure on the regime in charge there.