I'm going to follow up on my colleague Mario Silva's line of questioning.
I recently attended the second annual Summit for Human Rights, Tolerance and Democracy in Geneva, where we heard witness testimony from Venezuelan human rights defenders, lawyers who had in fact defended political prisoners. The testimony was uniform and consistent, both last year and this year, about patterns of intimidation and repression and about the criminalization of dissent in Venezuela. Witnesses spoke about the prosecution and persecution of human rights defenders. They said that the security forces are complicit in these human rights violations, that they are attended by a culture of impunity, that there is state-sanctioned anti-Semitism that is not unrelated to the Iranian connection, and that there is a pattern of repression of the media as well as the legal, educational, and cultural sectors, and the like.
I know you've made reference to the monitoring done by the Canadian government through its embassy and through other means. My question has to do with the use we are making, if any, of regional and international human rights mechanisms to not only make our voices heard but also to hold the Venezuelan authorities accountable in that regard. The specific thing I'm concerned about is how we are registering not only our concern but our condemnation of this pattern of increasing repression. Are we just monitoring and continuing to monitor, without actually taking initiatives or démarches to register our concern?