As Mr. Marston raised, I think there is sometimes this concern about what will happen to Canadians elsewhere, and what is already happening in Iran and Libya, and so on. I think the response is almost the flip side of the way it was presented. Right now we are seeing the commission of these abuses. Exactly what Zahra Kazemi faced in Evin prison has gone on many times since. This is happening in Libya and elsewhere, with the kinds of indiscriminate and widespread human rights abuses we're seeing.
We really have the potential to send a strong message that this is not going to be tolerated any more. This is all very new. It's really only in the last 10 or 15 years, at the criminal level internationally, that we started to have institutions to enforce these laws. We have the ICC and some national-level criminal cases on these issues. The idea of civil cases provides another opportunity, particularly when criminal cases don't always have the necessary resources because they're government-funded. Civil cases give yet another mechanism to try to bring people to court, provide some measure of accountability, and send that clear message.
So I think that's really the most important response. We have an opportunity to save money in our budgets by not having to respond too little and too late to international atrocities. We have the possibility to save lives through this kind of deterrence.