Thank you.
I have three brief points. One, I wanted to note for the record that we have appreciated the interventions of Foreign Affairs officials, those working within the human rights division, on specific cases of AIDS activists who have been detained in the past, including the one I mentioned, Dr. Wan Yanhai.
I think the problem here is that the dialogue, structurally, is limited, and that's why we've made the kinds of recommendations we have. This is not necessarily an attempt to say Foreign Affairs has not been doing its job, but there's a broader discussion that needs to happen, and that needs to involve parliamentarians.
The second thing I wanted to say was that to follow up on Mr. Marston's question, I think it's absolutely critical that Canada have the credibility it needs going into discussions with China about human rights. We are very concerned on the domestic front that we not backslide on commitments to gay rights, that we not backslide on actually taking innovative and even established and proven harm reduction measures to deal with HIV among injection drug users. This includes, for example, having the safe injection site in Vancouver, of which we need more, where having them would be suitable.
We certainly need to look at the issue of the criminalization of sex workers under Canadian law. I understand there is a parliamentary subcommittee looking at this issue, which will be reporting back next month. I think parliamentarians certainly need to take seriously that as long as we criminalize these populations, we make it harder to actually address the HIV epidemic, and we expose them to greater risks of human rights violations.
Fortunately, we do not have forced detention in so-called rehabilitation camps for sex workers in Canada--let's hope we never see that day--but we certainly have work to do to better protect the human rights of sex workers in Canada. I think if we do that, we show that we act in good faith when we go to China and say we have the following human rights concerns, and by the way, we are taking action within our own borders to address them. This is the link that we see to HIV as a public health issue, and between that and human rights.