Thank you, Chair and members of the committee.
“I hope for a day when no one in the world is imprisoned for their thoughts and for having such a beautiful demand as freedom.” This modest expectation was expressed by the celebrated Iranian poet and filmmaker Baktash Abtin, before he was sent to prison on a six-year term with his colleagues from the Iranian Writers' Association. Shortly after, Baktash contracted COVID-19 in prison. As his condition deteriorated, authorities refused to send him to the hospital until it was too late. He died on January 8 of this year in state custody. Baktash Abtin's death is a stark reminder of the lethal risks human rights defenders face, especially during a pandemic in overcrowded, unhygienic and undersupplied prisons.
Nasrin Sotoudeh, the embodiment of the human rights movement in Iran, was sentenced to 38 years and 148 lashes in 2019 for her support of women's rights activists, including sharing pins and flowers. At the height of the pandemic, her near-fatal 46-day hunger strike, anchored in a public appeal for the release of political prisoners, mobilized unprecedented international attention and allyship. As a result, she is now able to recover at home on conditional release, though with difficulty breathing.
Canadian-Iranian citizen Dr. Reza Eslami, a human rights law professor who has studied and taught here in Canada, was sentenced last year to seven years in prison for attending a training course abroad, part of a well-known pattern targeting dual nationals in Iran.
Swedish-Eritrean journalist Dawit Isaak and his colleagues remain the longest-imprisoned journalists in the world, in a country ranking at the bottom of the world press freedom index for more than a decade.
Canada must also prioritize the case of Canadian citizen Huseyin Celil, whose imprisonment goes back to 2006, and who faces a virtual life sentence in the Uighur region, all for his peaceful advocacy for his community, emblematic of the horrors facing the Uighurs as a group, including genocide.
Dr. Wang Bingzhang, founder of the overseas Chinese democracy movement, and the first Chinese national to obtain his Ph.D. in North America at McGill University, was kidnapped in 2002 and sentenced to life in solitary confinement after a half-day trial. His Canadian family has been advocating for his release ever since.
Senator Leila de Lima has been unjustly detained for over five years for her courageous work to end the culture of impunity in the Philippines for the atrocities of Duterte's drug war, which has summarily killed tens of thousands, amounting to crimes against humanity. Yet, Senator de Lima remains one of the most productive and popular legislators in the Philippines, now running for re-election in the May elections, with the future of Philippine democracy on the ballot.
In Russia, Anastasia Shevchenko's case represents the internal escalating crackdown in recent years. She was the first Russian criminally tried under the “undesirables” law, one of the Kremlin's key repressive tools, carrying up to six years in prison for human rights activity—all for holding a sign at a peaceful gathering stating “enough”.
These are just some of the emblematic cases that we've advocated for. At the same time, indigenous rights defenders are being killed or are arrested for their activism around the world, including those at the forefront of our collective struggle to protect our environment. Last year alone, a global initiative documented at least 358 murders of human rights defenders—the most conservative number.
I want to commend Canada for recently announcing the special refugee stream for human rights defenders at risk and launching the Declaration Against Arbitrary Detention in State-to-State Relations. But these cannot remain declarations. They must be acted upon with urgency and consistency across all global crises. Consular assistance for Canadians abroad is not a matter of discretion, but of international legal obligation, and legislation should be further adopted to this end.
The Magnitsky act is another invaluable tool in this regard, specifically worded to protect those rights defenders under consideration today, and should be applied as such. The government should work to strengthen the implementation of the Magnitsky Law, including a robust and accessible system that engages with civil society.
In our work, we have seen how advocacy can empower and help secure the release of rights defenders or the medical care they need to survive. As parliamentarians, your actions carry additional influence, not only for the defenders themselves, but for the movements they represent and the lives they protect.
Thank you.