Thank you very much, honourable member.
Right now, there is no recognition of peace as an actionable human right. I speak to people about it and say, how can that be? We have fundamental rights to security, to life. Those are some of the essential ones. With regard to freedom of speech, freedom of expression, you ask yourself, which of these rights do we have in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights? Which one of them can you really enjoy meaningfully in circumstances where there is no peace, in circumstances of armed conflict? You just look at what's happening in Ukraine to get your answer to that question.
We don't have peace recognized as an actionable human right, and it is long overdue. When you do that.... In law, there is a notion in Latin, which is expressed as ubi jus, ibi remedium, meaning “where there is a right, there is a remedy”, when that right is violated.
When you recognize peace as a fundamental human right, it will then mean that anyone who engages in a war of aggression—and by the way, a war of aggression is not recognized in international law as a crime against international law.... Anytime you have a war of aggression, the victims of that war of aggression will have a remedy against those who launched that war and accomplices to that war.
You have scenario where.... It's not just the prosecution, of course. We have to tighten the prosecutorial front to ensure that people are prosecuted. However, beyond the prosecution, the victims of these aggressions—people who have lost loved ones in this fight, for instance, in Ukraine, people whose homes have been destroyed—will be able to go after those who commenced that war and those who facilitated that war. When I talk about those who facilitated that war, you include other states that would have supported that war. You would also include corporations that furnish weapons to fight wars of aggression.
Let me be clear here: When I say corporations that furnish weapons, I'm not talking about corporations that have armed states to defend themselves against wars of aggression for purposes of self-defence. It would be once you supply a country with weapons that they need to defend themselves and then it turns out down the line that they used those weapons to launch a war of aggression that everybody recognizes. The weapons that were originally supplied are depleted at the first round of offensive, and then you keep resupplying so that the war of aggression continues. Any corporation that does that would be on the hook as an accomplice of a war of aggression, together with the country that commenced it.
If we have that kind of recognition, it would mean that these assets that are frozen all over the world.... Canada is wondering what we do with these frozen assets—