Professor Cotler, thank you for your questions. I will begin with your second question.
We have a very unusual situation in Iran in that it is not only lawyers defending political prisoners who are being put in prison, but the lawyers of lawyers representing political prisoners are also being put in prison. This is part of an overall climate of repression in which the regime doesn't want to tolerate any dissent whatsoever. Defending someone against false accusations in a court in Iran is somehow considered to be counter-revolutionary and can land you in jail.
So one sees here, compared, for example, to the relative relaxing of this climate under the tenure of President Khatami, a regime that is going backwards full speed. As I tried to explain in my testimony, this is really a sign of the regime's fear that it will lose its grip on power.
We have two competing forces. One is the demands of the majority of people for an open society, for democracy, and the increasingly violent repression of a small minority.
With regard to the recommendations of the committee, I think the report is an excellent report. There are many very good recommendations, and I would hope that most of them would be recommended.
If I were to prioritize some of them, I would look first at the political level, at following the lead of other countries in pursuing targeted sanctions against officials of the Islamic Republic that are responsible for crimes against humanity.
In September, President Obama issued an executive order that blacklists eight Iranian officials, not because of their participation in a nuclear program but because of their responsibility for massive human rights violations. The European Parliament recently adopted a resolution to that effect. I would hope that Canada--even if it's purely symbolic, because symbolic gestures are very important in the psychological war that's going on in Iran--would follow suit, have a commission of inquiry, determine which officials were implicated in the crimes against humanity following the elections of 2009, and send the message that governments, and not just human rights activists, are going to one day hold these individuals to account.
I would also, perhaps in a self-serving way, urge you to prioritize recommendation 23 of the report, which recommends, I believe, support for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center of which Roya Boroumand is also a fellow board member. As she explained--and as Professor Jahanbegloo also explained--documentation based on credible sources is extremely important for developing the kind of consciousness that in turn allows for the mobilization of the masses who demand justice and accountability. Actually opening an office for the documentation centre in Canada, as recommended by the report, I believe would send exactly the right message to the Iranian community in Canada and to the democratic movement in Iran.