As I said earlier, we see a really worrying trend by governments to use counterterrorism legislation, to misuse counterterrorism legislation, to prosecute individuals and human rights defenders for their activities. As long as you can frame them as a national security threat, then it allows you to really undermine their work and threaten their work.
We're seeing this in a number of countries around the world, and we've seen this recently in Israel as well, where you have six Palestinian civil society organizations, some of the leading human rights organizations in the country, that are documenting abuses by the Israeli government and working towards accountability at the International Criminal Court for war crimes that are committed in the Palestinian territories. We've seen an attempt by the Israeli authorities to muzzle their work, to limit their activities, by imposing baseless charges around counterterrorism on their actions.
What's been even more disconcerting, or equally disconcerting, for me, is the unfortunate silence by this government about these abuses. We've seen a number of western states that have condemned the actions of the Israeli authorities in listing these organizations as terrorist, using those baseless charges, but unfortunately we saw complete silence on the part of Global Affairs Canada and on the part of this government. There was no condemnation of those abuses.
I think what happens is that once Canada turns a blind eye to abuses by its allies, it only exacerbates the situation. It worsens the human rights crisis in a country, and it sends a signal to other states that those actions are condonable and fine to move forward.