Good morning to you both. Thank you for joining us today at our committee.
Maybe I'll start with you, Mr. Black. I had the opportunity as chair of the subcommittee on international human rights to travel with the members of our subcommittee to Washington just about three weeks ago. We engaged in a number of discussions. We met with about 14 different members of Congress, and a number of senators too, during that time. We had interesting discussions on mutual areas of agreement on human rights issues. We discussed South Sudan, Venezuela, Russia, the Rohingya in Myanmar?, Iran, and a number of other common ground areas. What became fairly clear during those discussions was that there's still a bit of a vacuum created at the administration level in terms of future directions on some of those files. Now, some of the big ones we've spoken about here already today—Iran and Russia—but on many of the others, partially probably due to the lack of appointments in some of those areas, or vacancies still to be filled, there just seems to be a bit of a disconnect in terms of where they stand in the administration. We've heard broadly about the slashing of international aid budgets, which is something that could happen within the next couple of years, if not immediately.
How do you see this playing out? How do you see even within the Republican Party the push-back that may come on a number of files, specifically dealing with international human rights? How is he going to be able to manage Congress and the Senate moving forward on some of these international global affairs?