First of all, Professor Cotler, I pay my respects to you. In our respective earlier lives, you as an academic and me as a practising judge, we met on a number of occasions and I'm most respectful of your question.
I think the answer I would give is the answer I gave when I was asked a very similar question in the General Assembly: what can we do? The answer I gave at the time was that whenever you meet the representatives of DPRK in the corridors, you should tell them that this is not acceptable. Whenever you meet the representatives of China and the Russian Federation, you should give them the same message.
We are, after all, this month and next month celebrating the enormous sacrifices of the Red Army and the Russian people in bringing an end to the Second World War, in which they were close allies of Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the other P5 countries. They have an interest in securing peace and stability.
There will not be peace and stability on the Korean peninsula so long as there is a disrespect of fundamental human rights. This is a reality that I think needs to be brought home to them.
In the meantime, there's work to be done. Next month a field office will be established to continue to collect the testimony, and the greatest peril, as far as the follow-up of the report of the commission of inquiry goes, is that, because of other pressing international concerns, it will go off the agenda.
That is why I'm so grateful to this committee of the Canadian Parliament that you are signalling today that this is not off the agenda but that it is still on the agenda and it has not been repaired. I would hope that this committee will continue to operate and continue to remind people of the work of and the report by the commission of inquiry, but we should not give up on the work that the Security Council can do if it chooses to do so.
Somehow there needs to be a way for Russia and China to see, whatever their geopolitical concerns, that there are deep issues of human rights in a country that has the fifth-largest standing army in the whole world, with a population of 24 million, and which reportedly has 15 to 20 nuclear warheads and increasingly sophisticated missile-delivery systems, and which is now experimenting in submarine technology with the potential of spreading the power of the nuclear arsenal that it has.
This is an extremely serious issue for peace and security, and when you have countries with no respect for the fundamental human rights of their people, that is a very unstable situation. Therefore, it is of deep concern to Canada and people everywhere, and to the lives of people in the Korean peninsula. Accidents, mistakes, and risks are great, and we cannot simply put this into the “too hard” basket. We have to turn the intelligence and the unanimity of the human family to finding a solution to this problem.