We're honoured today to have an expert on the human rights situation in Burundi with us. I will briefly introduce Ketty, and then I'll leave the rest of our intervention to her.
Good afternoon, and thank you for this opportunity to address the Subcommittee on International Human Rights, as part of its study on the human rights situation in Burundi.
Following a period of overt repression in the second half of 2015, associated with the discovery of dead bodies in the streets of Bujumbura on a near-daily basis, the crisis in Burundi has moved into a new, less overtly violent phase, with a climate of fear taking hold in the capital and elsewhere in the country.
With serious human rights violations ongoing, Amnesty International calls on Canada to maintain and strengthen its scrutiny of the situation in Burundi.
We are honoured today to have Burundian women's human rights defender, former journalist, and poet Ketty Nivyabandi present today to speak on behalf of Amnesty International. Ketty recently arrived in Canada as a refugee. She is now living here with her daughters in Ottawa, and she can speak first-hand about the human rights situation in Burundi and about its particular impacts on women and girls.
I'll pass this over to you, Ketty.