Our position is that, going right back to the very first of the free trade agreements that were negotiated, the Canada-U.S. agreement being the precursor to many others—a lot of people don't realize that it was the cornerstone of literally thousands of bilateral agreements that followed—when we began our negotiations with Mexico, we faced many of the same issues.
My view has always been the following. A free trade agreement should stand on its own. Protocols, agreements that deal with the environment, labour rights, and human rights, should stand on their own as well. I've never been of the view that because they stand on their own, they have less value or less importance. So this insistence that we throw it all into the same....
If I were a 110% full-time human rights activist, I would say I would not want free trade agreements to be integrated with my human rights agreement. The reason I wouldn't is that I wouldn't want it to besmirch the purity, the clarity, and the importance of that. You throw it all together and then what do you have?
So I'm all for side agreements that have teeth, that really matter, and that are taken very seriously in the negotiations, but I would not put them all together. When you put them all together—I'm a trade lawyer by profession—there's a tendency on the part of people who are dealing with trade agreements not to think perhaps as much about human rights agreements. I want the top commitment of our country and of the Colombian authorities to human rights to stand on its own, to have a very strong set of foundations so that it will stand on its own, but not as an adjunct to something.
You know, the economists will say that free trade agreements are vastly so much more important, and we just have this little side thing over here called human rights. That's not the way I see the world. So I say, let's have side agreements—I don't even like to call them side agreements, let's call them “complementary” agreements—that have real meaning, real teeth, and that are negotiated in earnest. I think in the case of Colombia, that's extremely important.