Thank you so much for this.
One of the biggest problems for many years and many decades has been that dictators have long learned how to work together very effectively. The dictators' club is very tightly knit. They coordinate, they co-operate and they share—I'm not going to call them best practices—worst practices among themselves. It is long past time that democracies learned to coordinate and co-operate with similar effectiveness, and I think one of the most important areas in which this should be a priority is the area of sanctions.
Many years ago, when Bill and I were beginning this global campaign for accountability, there was an interparliamentary body, an interparliamentary forum committee, specifically on Magnitsky sanctions. It was chaired by Irwin Cotler, who was then a member of the Canadian Parliament, and it included legislators from different places in the world: the U.S., countries across western Europe, the European Parliament and so on.
It would be a very useful and very important idea to go back to similar formats of creating some sort of interparliamentary body or interparliamentary format to share the best practices for how to defend democracies against dictatorships and how to put these sanctions in place against human rights abusers, violators of the rule of law and crooks. How can they be shared and strengthened, and how can democratic nations work together against dictators at least as effectively as dictators, unfortunately, are working together against democratic nations?
There are already, of course, existing forums and bodies in which this work can take place. One obvious one is the parliamentary assembly of the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, of which Canada is a full member. Another potential body is the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, of which Canada is an associate member, and Canadian parliamentarians do take regular part in these sessions.
It's important to use formats such as these to share best practices and copy them across the board so that the democratic world stands united against these threats, as opposed to allowing the Kremlin to find weak spots among democracies to see where it can find vulnerabilities and where it can try to damage them more.