Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for being here today.
My question is about civil society and the space—or lack thereof, really—for civil society organizations to operate, particularly in Kazakhstan and Poland, where very clear measures, it would seem, have been taken to constrain the operations of civil society and civil society's ability to exert any influence in terms of democratization. There's a bit more room for civil society to operate in Ukraine and Latvia.
I wonder if you could speak to that and perhaps even extend it beyond these four countries. You've talked about Belarus.
I know that in Hungary, for instance, recent legislation has been tabled that would see NGOs that have any sort of foreign tie, whether in terms of financing from the Soros organization—and George Soros has been made out to be some sort of demon in Hungary—or in terms of communication with NGOs based in the west that for very good reasons might want to help encourage a democratic dialogue within Hungary and the central and eastern European regions....
I wonder if you could speak to these issues.