Welcome to the 20th meeting of the House of Commons Subcommittee on International Human Rights. Today is Tuesday, February 7, 2012, and today we have as witnesses two representatives of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, that is
Patricia Malikail, who is the director general of the Africa bureau,
and Robert Bissett, who is the Deputy Director.
of the eastern and southern Africa relations bureau.
We will deal with their testimony first.
At the end of the meeting, I'm going to address a piece of committee business regarding the additional meeting. I don't want to do that just yet, because I want to wait until we have all of our members here; there is at least one who I am hopeful will show up. There's a scheduling issue, and it's hard to schedule people's availability until you know what that is.
Without further ado, we will turn things over to our witnesses. I'm sure you know this, but we normally have about 10 minutes for the opening remarks, and then we go to questions.
We will begin with Madame Malikail.