Order, please. This is April 1, 2000 and the Subcommittee on Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade holds its fifth meeting.
Of course, today is April Fool's Day, but I am always reminded that it ends at noon. We're back on to serious matters, and we have a very serious matter in front of us today.
We have two very distinguished witnesses regarding our ongoing hearings into the universal periodic review. Our witnesses today are Leilani Farha, who is the executive director of the Centre for Equality Rights in Accommodation, and Alex Neve, who is the secretary general of Amnesty International, English Canadian section.They are both very welcome here.
We have some other items that I want to go through before we get to our witnesses, if you don't mind.
The first thing I want to do is to draw the attention of members to a procedural error that I have been guilty of in the past that our clerk and deputy clerk caught for us. With regard to the rule we have on the order of questions, we adopted a rule that says that....
I'm actually going to read what it says:
during the questioning of witnesses, there be allocated seven (7) minutes for the first questioner of each party; and that thereafter five (5) minutes be allocated to each subsequent questioner (alternating between Government and Opposition parties)
In the last session, the second round didn't actually reflect that properly. We just did the whole first round all over again. I actually hadn't realized I'd made that mistake until it was drawn to my attention by the clerk at the last meeting. So I have to follow the rules, until such time as the committee decides to alter the rules. So that will affect our second round somewhat. That's one item.
The second item is just to remind committee members that there was a request to appear regarding the situation of Nathalie Morin, who, as you know, is currently confined in Saudi Arabia. We don't have to do this right now, but I would just like to seek the interest of members on this to determine whether or not they have an interest. Then, if there is interest, we have to determine when to schedule that matter.
The third thing I want to bring up is the study on human rights in Venezuela. I want to remind members to submit their list of potential witnesses to the clerk.
Do we have a deadline for that? No?
Obviously the sooner the better, though.
The fourth matter is that we had discussed the idea of inviting someone from Heritage Canada regarding the UPR hearings, but as a practical matter we can't do so--unless we have another hearing--and that leads me to Mr. Marston's motion.