Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome to our witnesses. I will try to leave Mr. Cannan a bit of time. He has a couple of questions as well.
My first question is to Mr. Harrison. Mr. Harrison, you present yourself as an expert in human rights assessments, and I appreciate that. Hopefully you understand that this is a new process here. It's not one that we've followed up on with free trade agreements in the past. If you will, we're going into unchartered territory, territory that quite frankly I think is positive for this trade agreement. The reaction and the answer I'm looking for from you is the fact that, as I see this at least, what we're doing, first of all, is having rules-based trading. That puts parameters on a whole number of areas. By adding the human rights assessment to that, we've put parameters in another area that traditionally would be outside of free trade agreements.
You've talked about the assessment process and the importance of it being independent, and I would agree with that. But the importance of adding it to the agreement is that no one is trying to say that every free trade is perfect. No one is trying to say that human rights in Colombia has been perfect. What we are saying is we do believe, and every indication has proven, that human rights have improved in the last decade in Colombia. There's still work to be done, but certainly we're moving in the right direction. So adding this human rights impact assessment to the free trade agreement, moving forward with a rules-based agenda on human rights, I would expect should be a positive step in this agreement.