Evidence of meeting #8 for Subcommittee on International Human Rights in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was pakistan.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Michael Levitt
I call this meeting to order.
I'd like to begin by welcoming Julia Bicknell, director of World Watch Monitor. She is from London and has come to testify before us.
I want to point out for the committee members that, as you see in the committee business schedule, we are going to take 10 minutes at the end to do some in camera work, so we'll adjust the schedule of questions accordingly.
That said, again, thank you for joining us. We'll have you begin with your 10-minute statement.
Julia Bicknell Director, World Watch Monitor
Thank you very much indeed. Thank you particularly for having me here all the way from the old country.
As a former BBC journalist, I thought I would just structure what I say for the next 10 minutes around the five questions that are key to any journalist, and that is who, what, where, why, and when.
I'll introduce myself. As you heard, my name is Julia Bicknell. I was a journalist in the BBC World Service starting in 1980. In the World Service, which hopefully many of you might have heard at some point in your travels, I was involved in the main World Service newsroom in English. We were gathering news from all around the world. We were writing it. We were verifying the sources in order to produce those news bulletins. I also spent some time producing Newshour, the main news and current affairs program. In that program, we did news analysis.
In 1991, two weeks before the Kuwait war broke out, I was just about to arrive in Pakistan on a three-month travel scholarship. I was due to backpack across the whole of Pakistan, and I fell in love with the country. I asked the BBC if I could go back to be based there. I arrived again 1992. During my year there, I basically covered the floods, the riots, the plane crashes, the government changes, and so on.
I also covered the situation of minority faiths in Pakistan. That included the Ahmadiyya, whom I met very early in my trip, the Ismailis, and the Christians.
There was an issue that was particularly affecting minority faiths at that time. It was about the Pakistan government's intention to introduce compulsory registration ID cards that stated your religion. I covered that for the BBC World Service.
As part of that reporting, I went to visit a minority Christian community just outside Islamabad, the capital, where I was living. These people were living—I'm not kidding—amongst gravestones. They were living in a cemetery. That was their community.
My friend Iqra will know the term katchi abadi. It means “slum” in Urdu. Their katchi abadi was in a cemetery. Their view of the western world came in through their satellite television. However poor they are, they have a satellite TV. What were they watching in 1992? They were watching Dallas and Dynasty. That was their view of the world coming into their slum. That really affected me.
Fast forward to the summer of 1994. This was a year when I spent the whole summer in the World Service reading the BBC World Service news: “17:00 Greenwich Mean Time—the news, read by Julia Bicknell”.
That summer was the summer of Rwanda. As you can imagine, I was reading over and over again about the atrocities being carried out in that country. As you know, your own Roméo Dallaire during that summer was pleading to the United Nations to intervene in that situation.
After those experiences, I moved to a part of the BBC called the World Service Trust. That's what I call the international development arm of the BBC. It's what I call bringing international development through developing the media in developing countries. We often went out from the BBC. We were invited by the country governments to transform their media to make them more able to hold their own governments to account and to ask their politicians difficult questions about issues such as corruption in governments.
As part of that, I went to live in Vietnam. When I was living in Vietnam, I trained local journalists on the national radio and TV station to produce—it was not TV, it was the radio station. They were producing, for the first time ever, national radio phone-ins. They didn't know what a phone-in was. When I arrived, thinking I was going to teach them how to produce a phone-in, I realized they had no concept of people phoning in the way you do here in Canada. A friend of mine produces Cross Country Checkup. You have a way of having an open national debate across the entire country. In terms of a country like Vietnam, there is no way they were doing that back in 1998.
I really understood what was happening in Vietnam to minority faiths, particularly among the ethnic Hmong. They were being discriminated against if they didn't hold to the beliefs of the Communist Party, the Communist government at the time.
I then moved to Africa and I commuted to Sudan, both north and south. I spent time at the edge of Darfur at the height of the Darfur crisis, and I arrived in Juba three weeks after the peace agreement was signed.
All of this background means that along with visiting places like Kenya and Somalia, I managed to work. I was managing programs funded by UNICEF and UNDP.
John Kerry said last week in the United States, “It’s up to us to recognize that we can’t lead a world that we don’t understand and that we can’t understand the world if we fail to comprehend and honor the central role that religion plays in the lives of billions of people.”
I felt that the story I had seen happening to people of minority faiths around the world was under-reported. There were major violent events that happened in India and Pakistan that, because I was working in Africa, I never even heard about. As I was sitting in the heart of the BBC, I thought that if I'm not aware of them, that means 99% of the world is not aware of them either, because I'm an international news junkie.
That brings me to the what and the when.
In the summer of 2012, I left the BBC and started what I called a niche online news agency that reports what's happening to Christians under pressure for their faith around the world. You might immediately ask why I focus on Christians. Well, our website states that we uphold everybody's right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, but we exist to tell with accuracy and authority the part that involves the global church under pressure for its faith, whether that's Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox.
Now to the question of where.
I should add that while our focus is the developing world, not the western world, I have far more stories than I can possibly cope with coming from Asia and Africa. I'm not at the moment reporting on what's happening in Canada or the United States or, indeed, western Europe. We aim to surface the stories that no one else in the mass media knows and hears about. We aim to be the most trusted, reliable, and authoritative source of information about the global church.
How do we get our sources and our information?
Over the past four years I've built a network of stringers—that's professional reporters—around the word in these places, such as north Nigeria, India, and Pakistan. It's not only my reporters who report back to me, but I have also developed trusted networks of religious leaders, NGOs, and community-based groups in such countries. Because they're on the ground and they're part of the local community, they can get there quickly.
I'll give you one quick example.
In December of 2014, a young Christian couple who were bonded labourers in Pakistan—which actually is technically illegal—were attacked by a violent mob of over 600 people who had been incited to violence by loudspeaker mosque announcements that the woman had committed blasphemy. My reporter phoned me and left a message for me saying that this had happened at about 7 a.m. By a couple of hours later, he was already in the village. He interviewed the relatives of the victims, he drove back to his home, and he wrote a story that night. I got up early the next morning, I edited it, and we got it out to the world. That was a horrific story that shocked Pakistan, but we had a man on the ground telling us that story. He had eyewitness accounts.
Our website is subscription-based. It's free. You don't have to pay for it; you can simply log on to the website. You can subscribe for any country or all countries.
I want to mention one last issue, the Chibok girls, whom many of you have heard about.
What impact do we have from the World Watch Monitor? Our report of the Chibok girls—the Chibok girls is not an isolated incident—hit the international headlines, but in fact that was part of a Boko Haram pattern of committing atrocities against women and children that has been going on since 1999. An organization called Open Doors—Paul Johnson is the chief executive here in Canada, and he's been hosting my visit—which had done a lot of research with researchers on the ground, had identified this pattern of violence against women and girls in northern Nigeria. We didn't particularly push that report, but it went out. People from legal centres in New York picked it up, Amnesty International picked it up, Human Rights Watch picked it up, and our report went as part of the evidence to build the case against Boko Haram in the International Criminal Court in The Hague for committing atrocities against women and girls.
I didn't see how long I have, but I think my time is up. That was a quick briefing.
Thank you.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Michael Levitt
Thank you. Actually, you were right on 10 minutes. That's very impressive—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Michael Levitt
I was going to say it was your BBC background.
We're going to begin with the first round of questions.
Mr. Anderson, take it away.
Conservative
David Anderson Conservative Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK
We're very excited that you're here with us today. We had a conversation the other day, and someone mentioned to me that it's important to know how to separate the signal from the noise.
Conservative
David Anderson Conservative Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK
In Iraq, for example, everyone was killed or getting killed—all groups were—but when you're going to pick and choose an event to advocate for it—
Conservative
Director, World Watch Monitor
Sorry. I was thinking I was hearing you naturally.
Conservative
Director, World Watch Monitor
Yes, I have it better now. I was thinking that if you were speaking English I would be able to hear you.
Conservative
David Anderson Conservative Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK
I wanted to ask how you separate the signal from the noise in the events that you choose to cover.
Director, World Watch Monitor
As I say often, I spend as much time standing down stories as I do standing them up. That means working out which stories are exaggerated, which stories people are promoting. I have to do this because people want to get donor dollars. I always check the sources back to the origination. I don't just read something on the Internet and think it must be true.
With my BBC training, I know a lot about which news agencies are trusted around the world. For instance, on Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in London, has proven itself to be pretty reliable. There are ones that I know I can trust. There are ones I know I have to be a bit cautious of.
Of course, you can triangulate. You get something from one news agency and you ask whether it's what you're hearing from people on the ground, whether it's confirming. For instance, governments often take a long time to confirm the number of people killed in an atrocity. Often NGOs based in a community have a much clearer idea. It's that kind of thing. My whole background has trained me on how to separate the signal from the noise.
Conservative
David Anderson Conservative Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK
You talked about your expertise in dealing with Christians who are under pressure. Have Canada and the west been responsive enough to the plight of Christians under pressure in developing countries, or have we gotten complacent and failed to pay attention to this problem?
Director, World Watch Monitor
People have an idea of what Christianity is. They think it's a western or, dare I say,a North American religion. We sometimes forget, to our peril, that Christianity was birthed in the Middle East. It's actually not a religion of white people. It's a religion that came out of the Middle East. People have told me they're shocked when they hear that Christians speak Arabic. They don't realize that there are millions of Christians who speak Arabic. There's an awful lot of education that needs to happen in our countries.
I think we have to educate the churches as much as we have to educate anybody. There is a real sense of religious illiteracy, particularly in the media, and I can hold my hand up as having been one of them. What often happens is that people, if they don't have a faith of their own, can't put themselves in the mindset of someone for whom that is absolutely part of life. John Kerry says we have to recognize, if we want to understand the world, that for perhaps 90% of the world's population, religion is a key, integral part of their lives. I think we have to get out of our western mindset and start being more aware of how the rest of the world lives.
Conservative
David Anderson Conservative Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK
Are you familiar with the work of the Office of Religious Freedom?
Director, World Watch Monitor
I'm a bit familiar with it. I've met Andrew Bennett. I've met him twice. I met him once at the foreign office in the U.K. and once again last year in Rome.
Conservative
David Anderson Conservative Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK
He was doing some important work internationally. That office has been shut down, as I'm sure you know.
How can the Government of Canada effectively support religious organizations working to promote religious freedom around the world?
Director, World Watch Monitor
I was very impressed by Andrew Bennett when I met him in London and again in Rome. I walked in Rome with him and had quite a deep conversation with him about what's happening in Ukraine. I was sad to hear that his office had been closed, but that's the government's decision.
I think that we would want the Canadian government to ensure that the work he started is able to continue. It's up to other parliamentarians and people of similar experience to keep tapping into that experience that he had started to develop. I would really recommend that.
Conservative
David Anderson Conservative Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK
Could you give us your opinion on the ways in which religious persecution is often connected to the repression of other human rights? Do you feel there's a connection between them?