Thank you very much, Mr. Kenney. I'm very happy to be here to discuss my evaluation report.
I believe the committee has received copies of this report in English and French. If I could say so, I'm very happy that it has become available in French, thanks to the Parliament of Canada. The report was issued by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, but it was only issued in an English language version.
This report arose out of a telephone call I received from Henri-Paul Normandin, the head of the human rights section of Foreign Affairs, asking me to write a report assessing the human rights dialogue process that has gone on between Canada and China since 1997. There have been nine of these dialogues; none took place in the year 2001.
I have some background relevant to this work, in that after I became a member of the political science department at Brock University, I was asked by Foreign Affairs to be borrowed to serve in the Canadian embassy in Beijing twice. My second posting started in 1998, which was just after we started this process of human rights dialogues, so I was present at the third, fourth, and fifth rounds of the dialogue. In my capacity as a representative of civil society, I was speaking on behalf of the Canadian Council of Churches. I was there for the ninth round, which I attended in the course of my evaluation report.
Before I say what the report roughly says, let me first say what it isn't. The report was written by me under a contract that came through at the end of July. I submitted the report to Foreign Affairs at the end of December, but they did not release the report immediately. They had some concerns about some of the content of the report, and they asked for changes before a public version would be released.
I produced another version on February 1, but this version was also not released right away. More discussion took place, and it was determined that the report would be divided into a classified version and a publicly available version, and I would presume that you have both versions of the report. Anyway, there was a classified supplement.
I produced another version at the beginning of April, and then further revisions were made. Finally, the version that I submitted on April 19 was released by the department in, I believe, May.
I would say that while this report was subject to review by the Government of Canada, I believe the main thrust of my assessment of the human rights dialogue is retained in the report. Of course, in the course of your questioning, I can clarify any uncertainties that might be in there because of removal of some text. The total amount of text that was removed amounts to about 1,200 words.
The other thing about this report is that it's simply an assessment of the human rights dialogue. Under the terms of my contract with the Government of Canada, I was not supposed to make recommendations about what Canada should do in future with regard to this kind of engagement. In fact, when the Canadian embassy in Beijing became aware that I was attempting to set up meetings with a view to looking at future possibilities, they suggested that I was exceeding the mandate of the contract and that I therefore perhaps shouldn't do it anymore. They did so quite rightly, because I had to follow the contract.
With regard to the report itself, my procedure was that I went to the Department of Foreign Affairs and attempted to read all of the classified and unclassified files relating to the human rights dialogue process. That was in August of last year. In September, I traveled to China and met with about forty-some Chinese people who had been involved in human rights dialogues. Some of them had been involved in as many as sixteen across several countries, because on the Chinese side, the number of people involved in the bilateral dialogues they have, not only with Canada but with many other countries, is rather limited.
Then I returned to Canada and met with people in government who had been involved, and members of NGOs who had been involved, and members of the NGO community who have not been directly involved in the dialogue but may have been consulted by the government in regard to this activity. I met with 74 people in all.
After I wrote the report, there was some degree of interest in this document. I think it's been extensively circulated throughout the world because the kinds of issues that are identified in the report are not present simply in the Canadian dialogue but are also present in the dialogues of other advanced western countries who have the same activity.
There's a consortium called the Berne process, which is hosted by Switzerland and holds an annual meeting to discuss various countries' dialogues on human rights with China. Canada has somewhat taken the lead in this area of assessing the dialogue and providing information that may be useful not only to our government's future programming in this area but also to that of other nations.
In terms of my discoveries, if I could just characterize them extremely briefly in the couple of minutes that are left, first of all, I found to my surprise that the Chinese representatives of different ministries and agencies who have been involved in the human rights dialogue were forthcoming with me about their dissatisfaction with some of the shortcomings of this activity. I had expected, when I went to China, because the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was fully aware of the assessment and facilitated some of the meetings with the Chinese agencies, that I would get a standard line about the importance of engagement over confrontation and a suggestion that the activity was worthwhile and should continue. In fact, what I found from the Chinese agencies was that they felt the dialogue was not serving their own institutional priorities in terms of modernization and democratization of their specific institutions. The courts or the police or the Procuratorate felt that the topics in the dialogue were not providing any information that would benefit them in their ongoing work.
When I went to the Chinese foreign ministry and explained to them what I had heard from the other Chinese ministries, they said this was because the other ministries were looking at it from their own perspectives--too narrowly--and didn't understand that this activity is a foreign ministry-led activity, that it is a government-to-government political and diplomatic activity relating to how Canada engages China on human rights and is specifically connected to our activities with regard to human rights in the UN.
The origin of the dialogue was that Canada ceased to support the resolution condemning China's human rights record in 1997; it was felt that bilateral engagement of China and quiet diplomacy would be more effective in promoting the cause of Chinese government respect for human rights in that country. In general, I feel that while this process in the initial phases started with some optimism and enthusiasm, as the years went by it has become apparent that the dialogues have not led to any verifiably observable results.
It's very hard to connect any changes in China with the dialogue process per se. The Chinese foreign ministry has downgraded their representatives to the dialogue and reduced the staff in the section that deals with it, and the Canadians I met have universally expressed concerns that this activity is not fulfilling project purposes.
I think I could conclude there, and you could ask me to clarify.