The case of the five-year-old orphan who was repatriated in October was really a group effort. There was the special rapporteur, who's with us today, and there were different mandate holders who had written about her case and called for the government to repatriate. Human Rights Watch released a report shaming Canada for not returning even one of its nationals from northeast Syria and really being an outlier on this case. There was the advocacy of her family and a lawyer who represents her, who has also put forward a case against the government.
It was really a group effort, but unfortunately what we heard following that repatriation—from both the Prime Minister and the former minister of foreign affairs—was, “That's it. We have no plan to repatriate any other national. The file is closed.” That was deeply disturbing and disheartening for us to hear.
The hope now—through committee studies like this and through members of Parliament who are willing to take this case forward—is that we will see some action on the part of the government to repatriate the children, ensuring family unity without separating the children from their loved ones. It's a very difficult advocacy list. It's not easy, clearly. This is a complicated issue made even more complicated by COVID, but fundamentally it's a failure of political will by this government and a failure of this government to be willing to spend political capital to repatriate this specific group of Canadians, because of their suspected ties to ISIS. We need to remove the stigma from this file and recognize that these are children who are in life-threatening conditions, trapped in a war zone amid a deadly pandemic. These are Canadian kids who need to be home.