He's done a number of studies. He's made a number of recommendations about states taking responsibility for the impact of their free trade agreements on the human rights of their trading partners.
Other academics at universities in Britain.... There's a large body of really good, sound information that shows that governments should carry out human rights impact assessments before the agreement goes into effect. As well, they should monitor and define very carefully, from a scientific point of view, where the areas are that need to be looked at, so that after the agreement is in operation you have a baseline from which to assess whether the effects actually happened.
As you know, Canada's trade agreement with Colombia was distorted somewhat, and the way it got passed and ratified in Parliament is that the Canadian government made an agreement with the Colombian government to carry out a human rights impact assessment after the agreement was in place.
Maybe your question can be answered on May 15, when the Canadian government is legally obliged to present its second report. Its first report was vacuous; it had no information about free trade. All it had was the actual contents of the trade agreement. This upcoming May 15 report should have some concrete data about whether they take the study seriously.
We've seen no indication so far that they are taking it seriously. Nobody, either at the embassy or in Foreign Affairs or in other places, has been able to tell us what their process is and what their plan is, and whether they have a strategy for carrying out the human rights impact assessment. So we have to wait and see what the government comes up with.
Part of that agreement was that both governments were going to carry out human rights impact assessments of the trade agreement in each of the countries. So far we've seen no evidence that Canada is assessing the impacts on human rights in Canada, and the Colombian government has been silent on it. They did nothing the first time around, and we don't expect that they'll do anything the second time around.