Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on July 20th, 2020

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you very much, Professor Cotler.

That's very strong and very important. National parliaments have a responsibility under these conventions to identify and to act, not simply to defer responsibility to some amorphous other. We should engage in international bodies to pursue a collective response, but we also have specific responsibilities under the convention. Is that correct?

[Irwin Cotler]

That is correct.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Okay. Thank you.

Could you speak more about the doctrine of responsibility to protect and what that obliges us to do? If the government were, today, to take your recommendation and say that what is happening to the Uighur Muslims in China is genocide, what would they then be obliged to do as a result of that declaration?

[Irwin Cotler]

When I was minister of justice back in 2005, the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted the responsibility to protect doctrine. That doctrine says, simply put, that if in any country we are witnessing war crimes, crimes against humanity and, God forbid, the unthinkable, namely genocide, and the government in that country is unwilling or unable to act or, worse, is the author of those crimes against humanity, if not genocide, then there is a responsibility on behalf of the international community to intervene and act to prevent, to punish and to sanction those war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. What we have here with respect to the Uighurs is a classic case study of such war crimes, crimes against humanity and, as I and others have mentioned, acts that are constitutive of genocide. That warrants our involvement, under the responsibility to protect doctrine, to initiate, undertake and implement the panoply of remedies that were heretofore recommended before your committee, some of which I recommended in my testimony, this being part of the responsibility to protect doctrine.

I might add just one other thing. I'm not unmindful of the fact that we are meeting in the aftermath of the 26th anniversary of the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. What makes the genocide of the Tutsis so unspeakable is not only the horror of the genocide itself, where some 10,000 Tutsis were murdered, every day for three months, but also that it was preventable. Nobody could say that they did not know. We knew but we did not act. Now, with regard to the Uighurs, nobody can say that they do not know. We know and we must act.

To quote from my mentor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, who taught me some of the more compelling human rights lessons I know, silence in the face of evil ends up being complicity with evil itself. Indifference to mass atrocities, let alone genocide, always means coming down on the side of the victimizer and not on the side of the victims. Our responsibility to protect is justice for the victims and accountability for the violators.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you so much.

As William Wilberforce said, “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”

In the minute I have left, I want to go to Ms. Asat.

Thank you so much for your testimony.

Did I hear you right that there's evidence of slave labour involved in the production of masks from China specifically?

[Rayhan Asat]

Yes, indeed. Actually, this information just came to light yesterday as a result of the incredibly detailed investigative journalism of the New York Times. Everybody knows there's a very well-documented research piece called “Uyghurs for sale”, which identified and flagged more than 80 international brands that are entangled in the use of Uighur forced labour. I think this has also extended to the masks during this COVID pandemic. As people are perhaps wearing masks to get around, they could perhaps be using one of those masks that were produced as a result of forced labour. It could be even my brother's prison labour.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you.

I believe you're testifying from the United States. Do you have any comments on initiatives in Congress and the U.S. Senate around addressing supply chain issues? I mentioned the Uighur forced labour prevention act and other bipartisan initiatives in the U.S. that are seeking to address this issue.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

You have about 30 seconds.

[Rayhan Asat]

Absolutely. With the passage of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, we now have pending legislation, which is, as you rightfully put it, the Uighur forced labour prevention act. I hope, with the massive use of Uighur forced labour tainting the global supply chain, we're not going to be limited to this legislation, but actually pass other legislation. This is a common practice, too. In the U.K. we have the Modern Slavery Act, and in Australia we have similar legislation. I hope this can be extended to other jurisdictions, but the specific [Inaudible—Editor] would be forced labour.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Ms. Asat.

We'll move to Mr. Zuberi, for seven minutes.

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Although we heard from Mr. Cotler, I would like to hear from the other two witnesses their expert opinion about what's happening to the Uighur people in terms of meeting the threshold of the genocide convention definition of genocide, which I'm sure you're familiar with given that both of you are lawyers and involved in this sort of work. If you don't know the definition, I can read it for you, but from your knowledge of the facts on the ground and the law, does this meet the definition of genocide?

I have a series of other questions, so I'd like a quick response on that.

[Rayhan Asat]

Yes, I'm happy to respond.

I think we do have a very strong case for genocide because it meets both the intent element.... I think that with everything we've seen so far, mass sterilization of women and detaining people of child-bearing age in internment camps and giving them lengthy sentences—15 to 20 years is a basic norm—and then separating children from their family members and placing them in these state orphanage schools, the Chinese government is perfectly laying the groundwork for eradicating the Uighur people as a whole. Not only does it meet the mens rea, the intent element under the genocide convention, but we also have well-documented evidence that shows the Chinese government did commit all these crimes. It meets both elements and it perfectly fits within the definition in the genocide convention.

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Thank you.

Mr. Neve, I'm sure you're very familiar with article II of the convention, which includes operatively the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, etc., and defines some examples of genocide, including preventing births and also forcibly transferring children, and other elements of the article.

Do you feel that the threshold is met, Mr. Neve?

[Alex Neve]

Well, I guess I have to qualify that I'm not in a position to be able to give my own personal views about that by virtue of my position as secretary general of Amnesty International Canada.

What I can say is that Amnesty—and this would be at the global level—has not yet taken a position that it is or is not constitutive of genocide. It's certainly something we're continuing to look at very closely. We would absolutely agree that many of the very serious concerns that we and so many others have now documented certainly point in that direction, but we have not come to a final conclusion.

Absolutely, we have a situation of massive and widespread crimes against humanity. Even at that threshold, there is a range of obligations on the part of Canada and the international community to take action at all levels. Even while the debate about whether it is or is not genocide continues, there is nothing that should forestall robust, meaningful and much more forceful action than we've seen to date.

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

If what Mr. Cotler said holds, which is that it does meet the definition of genocide, how does the responsibility to protect doctrine play here, Mr. Neve?

[Alex Neve]

I would very much echo the important comments that Irwin highlighted. I think that whenever we have debates about responsibility to protect, a lot of the focus goes to the end of that continuum, this notion of armed intervention, sending in the troops to respond to a situation of mass atrocities. Responsibility to protect is about so much more than that. It's about what is consistently short-circuited by the international community, the obligation to take preventive actions through a whole variety of means, be they sanctions or through very strong and forceful action at a multilateral level or through justice and accountability measures—all the things that for decades the international community has shied away from when it comes to China, trade and investment being more alluring than those sorts of preventive actions.

We need a very strong agenda on that front, with the kinds of steps through justice and accountability, universal jurisdiction, possibilities of individual sanctions, etc., and we need it now.

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Thank you.

I'd like to shift to the point of forced labour.

We know that an Australian institute, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, noted that 27 factories, nine of which are in Chinese provinces, are taking forced labour transfers of the Uighur people. We've heard of upwards of 80 companies, including Apple, Dell, Mercedes-Benz and Nike, that are benefiting from supply chains that are taking forced labour materials. What steps do you think businesses can do to prevent this from occurring? Second, what steps can governments take, in particular Canada?

I'd like to hear opinions from the panellists. Feel free, please.

[Rayhan Asat]

I'm happy to take this question.

I think we need to understand that Uighur forced labour has two unusual and defining characteristics. One is about the effort by the Chinese government to eliminate Uighur culture as a whole, but unlike the forced labour generated by human trafficking and drug cartels, Uighur forced labour is a government-engineered labour transfer scheme. Evidence suggests a highly coordinated system whereby state authorities select the labourers and oversee the forced labour directly.

In light of this, I think the tone has to be set very strongly from the top. Our politicians should make sure the public is very much aware of this. For consumers to demand change, they have to be aware of it.

I hope that in the Canadian Parliament there could be a strong advisory note like the ones we have within the State Department here. In addition to that, I hope there's a way we can ask our corporations to stop profiting from Uighur forced labour so that corporations can indirectly change the behaviour of the Chinese government.

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Now we'll move to Mr. Brunelle-Duceppe.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for their testimony, especially Ms. Asat.

Ms. Asat, your testimony was very touching and very disturbing. Our hearts go out to you, to your brother and to your people.

In your testimony, you talked about child abductions. Do we know what happens to those children once they are abducted?

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

We're going to suspend for a moment. The reason is that there are some issues with the interpretation, and with Ms. Asat and her mike, I think.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

To bring us back, we're requiring unanimous consent from everybody that we will forgo the interpretation of Ms. Asat because of technical difficulties.

I see everyone is in agreement. We can move forward, and we'll add time, of course, to Mr. Duceppe's time.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

I was thanking you for your testimony, Ms. Asat. I was saying that our hearts go out to you, to your brother and to your people.

In your testimony, you talked about child abductions. Do we know what happens once they are abducted? Do you have any idea?

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Ms. Asat, can you not hear the question?