It is November 24, 2011 today and this is the 10th hearing of the Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development.
Those of you who have items in front of you will see that we were going to deal in camera with committee business first. That would have involved kicking our witnesses and all the other people who have come to see us out of the room, doing our committee business, and then inviting them back in. It would also require more than the number of people we have here. We can have three members present for the purpose of receiving testimony, but doing any business requires more.
So I'm going to reverse the order. We'll do the committee business later on, when we have a full complement. We will start with witness testimony.
We have as our guest today Don Hutchinson, who is the general legal counsel and also vice-president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.
We're grateful to have you here with us today. We are in a smaller room than we were in last time. That's not a sign that we esteem your testimony any less; it's a sign of the fact that our returning forces from Libya are being recognized in our committee room upstairs. I think we all recognize that as a pretty important event.
We are, of course, continuing our study of the persecution of the Christian minorities in Iraq and Iran and the Copt community in Egypt.
Mr. Hutchinson, I invite you to begin your testimony whenever you see fit.