Good afternoon, and good evening from England, as it is now. Thank you very much for this opportunity to speak to you.
I am an academic. I work in the University of Warwick, and I specialize in issues of trade law and human rights law. I engage in a particular area of research on human rights impact assessments, both for trade agreements specifically and of human rights impact assessments methodologies generally. It is a great pleasure to talk on the subject and hopefully to raise some issues that may be useful to you in your deliberations about human rights impact assessments and reporting on the human rights aspect of the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement, which, as I understand it, is being proposed in an amendment to the current bill.
There is much interest in this topic internationally. UN treaty bodies have been calling for human rights impact assessments for many years. I've spoken recently to the WTO on this issue. I've spoken with politicians, civil societies, and many in the academic community, so the Canadian proposal is exciting and could become a model in this area, because no other country has yet included this within the scope of a trade agreement.
Hopefully you will have a copy of the one-page sheet I sent to you in advance. I set out there the original recommendation of the standing committee, with which I am sure you are all more familiar than I am, and the current proposal, as I have seen and understand it, for an amendment within the bill. It's the second proposal in particular on which I have some thoughts here and hopefully will shed some light on the way in which current thinking around human rights impact assessment may correlate with it.
What is a human rights impact assessment and why is it important? A human rights impact assessment is increasingly a term of art used to describe a particular process, and is being used in development projects, in parliamentary activities, in monitoring multinational corporations. So we have a lot of methodological guidance there. In the trade field, it builds upon work on social impact assessment done, for instance, by the EU, UNEP, and various ad hoc assessments. We have a body of work there about how social impact assessment of trade agreements takes place, which we can then apply in the human rights field. A limited number of human rights impact assessments have taken place as well, in Thailand, Costa Rica, Ghana, Honduras, Indonesia.
The key to a human rights impact assessment is that it must involve some form of evidence-based analysis of the trade agreement in question. So this is a technical process. It doesn't tell you anything ideological about whether a country deserves or does not deserve a trade agreement, nor about its overall human rights record or situation. What it aims to do is to look at the trade agreement itself and assess the degree to which that trade agreement will have or has had beneficial or negative human rights impacts.
In light of that, I want to go through some of the key characteristics of a human rights impact assessment that I think are particularly important for the proposed amendment to this bill.
First of all, on methodology, the legal obligations and key principles of human rights must be central to a human rights impact assessment, and indicators must be developed to tell us the measure of the human rights impacts of the agreement. This is a technical process that involves rigorous collection and analysis of data. We're talking about techniques like economic modelling, particular case studies, causal chain analysis, surveys, and expert opinion all being utilized to give us a picture of the human rights impacts of aspects of the agreement.
As a result of that, we require a multi-skilled interdisciplinary team with knowledge of economics, social science methodologies, and human rights standards. And we require an independent team, a team of experts rather than a team of people who are part of any kind of political process. We require participation from affected communities; that is an integral part of the human rights methodology, and it should be transparent and have open procedures adopted throughout. I won't go into the detail of that here, given there are time limits.
Going to the timing and the frequency of the assessment, a human rights impact assessment can be ex ante, so it would take place before the agreement--that was the original proposal of the standing committee--or it can take place afterwards, an ex post assessment.
That I think is the proposal we have before us now. It should become cyclical, so it should not be a one-off process, but it should be something that is repeated to assess how impacts are changing over time. Again, I think the current proposal is advocating a cyclical process.
The frequency of the assessment should depend on the scope of what is being assessed and the resources available. So in terms of scope, human rights impact assessments should be limited to specific impacts of specific provisions of the trade agreement identified by a scoping study. If we look at the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement, I think we have 23 chapters with a huge range of provisions on goods, services, investment, technical regulations, etc. The danger is that an assessment of all these different provisions without a previous identification of where the most important human rights issues may be occurring, particularly if they're occurring on an annual basis, may become a superficial exercise that is not able to appropriately use the methodologies, which will require extensive time and resources.
Obviously the scope of the assessment does to a certain extent depend on the resources available, so it is very resource-intensive. The more experts you have undertaking the assessment and the more money to do primary rather than secondary research, the more quickly you can do an assessment and the bigger the scope you can hope to achieve in terms of the chapters of the agreement you can analyze. So there is some consideration there of scope and resources together.
Finally, the results: you need precise, directed conclusions and recommendations and actions to be concluded at the end of any assessment. Many of the assessments that fail to have an impact are those that do not include precise recommendations directed to particular actors who are in a position to take effective action on the recommendations that are made.
In conclusion, and I hope I haven't gone over time, there is a lack of detail in the current proposal, which means it is difficult to assess it fully in terms of the final procedure that might be adopted. But my experience suggests that a more detailed blueprint that can be put together when a proposal is first on the table and that can be transcribed does help guard against problems of uncertainty at a later stage.
There may be concerns in the current process about people, scope, frequency, and results. In terms of people, there's the importance of independent expertise being at the centre of the impact assessment process. In terms of scope, as I said, the huge range of chapters of the trade agreement mean that it needs to be honed to deal with those particularly significant impacts. Frequency again depends on the resources available to the assessment, but that issue of scope and frequency must be thought of together. Finally, on results, in terms of an effective impact assessment that will have an impact on policy, there needs to be a clear setting out of the way in which results will be set out in the assessment and then acted upon by relevant actors.
I hope those brief thoughts help the committee in deliberations, and I'm happy to take any questions when needed.