Let me begin by saying that this is an excellent question. It goes to the heart of everything that we are speaking about.
In my involvement in the defence of political prisoners over the years, I always saw the particular plight of a political prisoner as really being a looking glass into the human rights violator country that was imprisoning him, and you couldn't, therefore, really separate the two.
On October 5—you were part of that, Marc—we brought to Ottawa the relatives of political prisoners, such as the wife of Raif Badawi, not only to share an appreciation of the pain and suffering of the families and the plight of the political prisoner involved but also because, at the very time that we were coming here, the fact was that Saudi Arabia was a candidate for the UN Human Rights Council. You cannot really separate the two. If you want to defend the political prisoner, you also have to hold the human rights violator to account.
This leads me to the second thing. We have to do what we can with respect to reforming our international institutions so that they in fact do promote and protect human rights and do not shelter the human rights violators.
The last thing—and this is the thing that pains me most, maybe because I just came from that panel of scholars—is that the worst horror we are experiencing today is in Syria. Every single day there are war crimes and crimes against humanity that are being committed. I spent many months in Syria over the years, and I always felt that Syria was an excellent candidate for the onset of the Arab Spring, because of the students, the faculty, and others whom I had met, and the incipience of civil society. I remember March 2011, when some young students marched with olive branches and were saying, “Peace, peace, dignity, dignity.” They were disappeared or gunned down. Those who came to replace them were assaulted, and that began the scorched earth policy of the Assad regime.
Towards the end of 2011, we had at the time only—quote, unquote—4,000 dead, and only—quote, unquote—some thousands who were displaced. At the time, there were those of us who were saying that “This is the time”, because war crimes and crimes against humanity were being committed every day then. I wrote an op-ed five years ago and said that this was a place for the responsibility to protect principle to be implemented on behalf of the innocent Syrian civilians.
Regrettably, those of us who were arguing for that were told that if we intervened, it would lead to sectarian warfare, to civil war, and to jihadists coming in, but everything we were told would happen if we intervened has happened because we didn't intervene.
Those are the dangers, therefore, of indifference and inaction in the face of mass atrocity.
Now, five and a half years later, we have more than a half a million dead, 12.5 million internally displaced, and more than 5 million refugees. I don't even like to use the abstraction of statistics, because behind every statistic is a human being. The thing that pains me most is that I believe this could have been prevented. It is much more difficult now to go ahead and engage in that protection.
That's why I am saying, just following up on the testimony before the foreign affairs committee, that we need a global human rights accountability act that will not only help to defend the individual violators but also will put into our SEMA legislation mass atrocity prevention: the implementation of the responsibility to protect that will bring together our domestic legal system and our international justice responsibilities so that we not only can protect the individual victims of human rights violations but also protect civilian society as a whole in places such as Syria.