The upcoming Human Rights Council session is going to be looking at four topics which are relevant to what we've talked about today. The most important ones are probably torture and counterterrorism, but there's also the special rapporteur on peaceful assembly who's also giving his annual report and the special rapporteur on human rights defenders, who is looking at the issue of transnational repression of critics of authoritarian states and the long arm of the state reaching out in the way that we've seen China doing. Those are four opportunities that Canada has to speak out on those issues.
As we saw recently that at the UPR of China, some 161 states spoke. Canada raised human rights concerns. We're grateful for that, but we saw real organization with pro-China voices, a whole range of states that gave boiler-plate statements and praised China in a number of ways.
We need to see much more organization with states that have concerns about the issues that we've raised today. The 24 countries that signed a Media Freedom Coalition statement raising concerns about Jimmy Lai's case and about media freedom in Hong Kong should be ensuring that they're organized before the Human Rights Council session. We think this is an opportunity for Canada to show real leadership, to shine a spotlight on these issues.
Very practically, what they can do, first of all, is to ensure that in the five weeks in the lead-up to the Human Rights Council, they're engaging with other states to see what these other states are doing and to ensure that a spotlight is shone on these issues.
Second, they should be preparing to engage with a Chinese delegation bilaterally when they're in Geneva. That's an opportunity to speak bilaterally, raise these concerns and press home the messages that we've been speaking about.
Third, publicly, in their own time, which is even shorter than the time we have here—they usually get two minutes and 30 seconds—they should be highlighting these issues and this case and making sure that the international community is making its voice heard loud and clear and that China hears it.
We know that China responds to what happens at the Human Rights Council. We've seen that in other cases. We've seen it have real leverage. We've also seen Canada in other cases secure release of political prisoners in other circumstances. It's high time that we saw the international community doing all it can to ensure that Jimmy Lai is released before we see this British man die behind bars for being a journalist and for being a pro-democracy campaigner.