Thank you.
The question to both of you is, how do you choose your priorities? Let me explain.
The frustration we feel as a committee, as politicians, is generally that there seems to be an obsession with capturing the one-off successes, the release from jail, and obviously one person sweltering unjustly in jail is one person too many. The human rights agenda writ large seems to be, from a popular perspective, inherently individualistic—for a number of reasons, and with cause—but sometimes the sense is that there is an impossibility to capture, advocate, or push for systemic changes in countries, pushing for a simple thing: one country observing one clause in their charter of human rights that would save 1,000 lives we've never heard of, or don't necessarily have to hear about, but it would save those lives.
I guess, Professor Cotler, you faced this first-hand as Minister of Justice, that tension between systemic change—the desire as a progressive country to achieve systemic change throughout the world with other states—and this seeming obsession. It's obsessive in the media, and I don't blame the media for that. I blame the human mind, focusing on one person who has been released or on one success story in a country that has a systemic record of human rights violations.
My question to you is, how do you choose your priorities? I think you answered why: it's because you're optimistic. Sometimes you must feel like Sisyphus. How do you address your daily activity with helping individuals who desperately need it, and advocating for systemic and progressive change?
Professor Cotler, perhaps, could answer first.