Certainly.
Thank you very much for appearing here today. We certainly appreciate it.
We've had a number of witnesses from civil society. I was the person who moved the motion to examine the UPR and the continuing committee and the process, because of a fairly large number of concerns that were brought to us, with words like “secretive”. It was clear that we had to get the process out onto the table so that people would understand, number one, the process: who had what responsibilities and where.
But there was another concern that we heard regularly. We had concerns raised over time about Canada's human rights record and about how, if anything was done--and they felt little was done--there wasn't a process to report that back to Canadians. There was concern about how there was no process to hold us accountable, in some way, for those things we agreed to do something about. It became an issue of follow-up, in the sense that they weren't included.
Now, obviously, this is a committee within a department of mostly bureaucratic people. It doesn't sound like it was initially designed to consult civil society, and it seems to me that in your comments at the beginning you said that you didn't have a mandate, actually, in the beginning, to consult civil society. It sounds good to hear you say things like how you are looking at a process, a way, to include civil society.
One of the things that was said to us before today was that there is a concern out there, again among civil society groups, that the reports they hear about don't contain the actual analysis portion to the degree that would help them understand the reports. Of course, part of what I as an MP am concerned about is that I understand and my constituents understand what's necessary for them to fulfill their own obligations under human rights. Is there any change coming in the reports that might address that perceived lack of analysis?