There are many legal issues in these types of cases. The key barrier in all of them is immunity. That is something that Bill C-483 would immediately remove, and then we could move on to the other legal issues.
Take the U.S. Supreme Court case. That's a situation where the court was able to look at a long history of civil litigation in the United States against human rights abusers and to feel comfortable in making its pronouncement that there is no immunity under their Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, that there has not been disruption of diplomatic relationships, and that there has not been a flood of lawsuits in the United States. There are a couple of decades of these types of cases that have been important to survivors of torture and other atrocities, but they have been limited in number and in scope. The United States Supreme Court was able to look at that issue and say that there is no justification for having immunity attached under their statute. In Italy there is an even more important point to be made, namely, that these are crimes that simply cannot incur immunity. That is a point that we have been trying to make and it is critical—these are not sovereign acts. The idea behind immunity is to protect other governments from lawsuits for sovereign acts. But torture, war crimes, and genocide are not acts that a sovereign is permitted to engage in. The Italian courts have taken a big step by recognizing this.