Thank you for the question.
There is one thing regarding the laws that have the object of protecting human rights defenders; no legislation has been passed yet. I believe that the legislation is in the third stage of the debate process within the Honduran congress. It has not yet been approved, and a number of civil society groups, including human rights groups, have criticized the fact that they have not been consulted on the latest text of this law. It's not clear what its contents are at this time. There has been no legislative progress to date on this front.
Regarding the issue of whether the free trade agreement could help human rights in the country, I think the record has shown that free trade agreements in the past have not been particularly helpful to Honduras. Certainly the agreement known as CAFTA-DR, the Central America free trade agreement, has not led to an improvement in the human rights situation in Honduras. It has been in effect for nearly 10 years now, during a period of time when the human rights situation has grown much worse. Furthermore, labour standards that are under the provisions of CAFTA and meant to be upheld by the Honduran government have clearly not been. There have been complaints filed, and the U.S. trade representative is apparently looking into those complaints. Certainly on the ground, labour organizations are saying that their rights are being violated more than ever.
On the broader issue of whether human rights in general are affected in a positive way, it's very difficult to see that when you have no real progress on the institutional front in the country. As I mentioned in my testimony, there were attempts to push through an effective police reform, which were disregarded by congress and the government. A police reform commission had the broad support of human rights defenders and made proposals for a new, organic law for the national police of Honduras, a new training program, community training, and human rights training for the police, and so on. All of these proposals were completely disregarded. Instead there has been, as I mentioned, a sort of broad purging of the force, which appears to be quite arbitrary and leaves many alleged human rights violators in place in the police force. A similar process has occurred within the judiciary.
These cannot be regarded as positive changes within the country, particularly when we see that the trend of targeted attacks on some of these at-risk groups has in fact grown worse. After a small measure of improvement in previous years, in this year, certainly in the cases of journalists and human rights defenders, they are more the object of attacks than they were, say, just last year.