At that time we recognized, as did the United Nations, the importance of ensuring that the protections that are available by virtue of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights be extended and be protected by the ratification of the optional protocol to the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
In fact, in the last two annual reports, the Correctional Investigator has also encouraged Canada to ratify the optional protocol and has pointed out that Canada was part of a group that drafted and voted in favour of its adoption by the United Nations General Assembly in December 2002. The Correctional Investigator also points out that one of the benefits of the protocol is that it establishes a system of regular visits undertaken by independent international and national bodies to places where people are deprived of their liberty, in order to prevent torture and other cruel, inhumane, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
He also pointed out that ratification would add to Canada's long historical tradition of promoting and defending human rights at home and abroad. It would also provide an opportunity to review the role and mandate of oversight agencies involved in the monitoring and inspection of places of detention and to strengthen oversight mechanisms where required.
Our view is that there's very clearly a need for the optional protocol in Canada. As well, Canada would do well to show international leadership by ratifying this convention at this time. I think we see many examples of that in the struggle to eradicate torture and ill treatment, which remains one of the most serious human rights challenges the world faces, and indeed that Canada has faced.
In our global struggle and in the global struggles that have significance for Canadians, we know that the recent cases of Zarha Kazemi in Iran, William Sampson in Saudi Arabia, Professor Kunlun Zhang in China, Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki and Ahmad El-Maati in Syria are stark reminders that Canadian citizens may be subjected to torture abroad as well.
There have also been domestic concerns, as I've already mentioned, such as the disturbing abuses that took place in the 1990s at the Prison for Women in Kingston, and at the Robert-Giffard psychiatric hospital in Quebec City in 2003, and the current use of extended segregation for women subjected to what Correctional Services Canada refers to as a “management protocol” in the new prisons for women, which underscores that discriminatory and torturous treatment can occur and is in fact occurring as we speak in Canada.
The optional protocol lays out a framework for regular national- and international-level inspections of detention centres with an eye to identifying and remedying the conditions that encourage and allow torture and ill treatment to take place. International support for the optional protocol continues to grow. On April 29, 2007, as this committee is undoubtedly aware, Cambodia became the 34th state party to adopt and ratify the Convention against Torture.
OPCAT entered into force on June 22, 2006, and that was after 20 countries became party to the protocol. The first meeting of the subcommittee on prevention of torture met in Geneva this past February.
It is, I think, and our organization would submit, an international embarrassment that Canada, which led the way on the introduction of this protocol, was not among the first group of nation states responsible for setting up this innovative body and defining its working methods.
But it's not too late. The first committee has only just met. I think it's very important that Canada take its rightful position and ratify the protocol. We think it would be most important that the subcommittee, which is the first globally established international expert body with jurisdiction to carry out inspections of detention centres, be ratified by Canada.
We think it's also potentially a way for Canada to show that it is in fact taking seriously its own internal reports, such as the reports of Louise Arbour, the reports of the Canadian Human Rights Association, the report of the Maher Arar inquiry, and the current investigations that continue, not to mention the myriad investigations that are now taking place in terms of RCMP situations and the possibility of having international oversight of RCMP lock-ups and other police lock-ups.
So it's our view that, building on our established international role as a leader in the area of human rights protection, Canada should still make every effort right now to participate in the early work of the subcommittee, and to that end we consider it to be a matter of the utmost priority that Canada move forward immediately and ratify the optional protocol without any further delay.
Thank you. Those are our submissions. We'll be happy to answer questions once Mr. Tremblay has completed his presentation.