Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I wish we were using this opportunity here to get the perspective of those people. We know that there is a study coming up. This is a very important committee. It deals with international human rights, but we don't have a large budget. When there are opportunities when people like you visit, Mr. Morales and Mr. Belloso, and for the benefit of the rest of the committee, we do take advantage of having people come to talk to us.
You can see by the tone of the questions from my colleagues here today, we do have a lot to explore. There is a lot of misunderstanding and misrepresentation about the voluntary system that we now have. As you probably know, and as many of us here know, this is why Canada is an attractive base country for mining.
I would like to ask you some questions now so that I will be able to refer to your answers when we have a fulsome discussion about what our role is in international human rights and in engaging the extractive industries based in Canada.
What I would like to ask each of you—you can decide who's going to answer first—is about this idea the criminalization of community leaders who speak up about issues, such as why we are against mining, as one of my colleagues brought up. If someone starts a movement in a community to bring up the reasons why you are against mining, they're criminalized. I'm not just making that as a statement. I would like you to answer and to back that up to give our committee understanding about what happens.
Whether it's under President Otto Pérez or another leader, there has been an administrative history now in which we have progressed to this criminalization of community leaders speaking out peacefully.
So please, explain more.