Thank you, Mr. Chair.
For the past 52 years, and today in over 70 countries, Doctors Without Borders or Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF, has alleviated suffering through medical care consistent with the fundamental principles of humanitarian aid: humanity, impartiality, neutrality and independence, and in line with medical ethics. MSF has no other purpose than fulfilling this social function.
Here in Canada, more than 180,000 Canadians support MSF, based on their trust and confidence in what we do. This has allowed us to send 267 Canadians and more than $84 million to our programs around the world in 2022.
Principled humanitarian work is recognized and protected by international humanitarian law, or IHL. Humanitarian organizations, such as MSF, providing essential services impartially with no commercial, political or other objective must be afforded the protection of IHL. Under IHL, humanitarian assistance cannot be considered support for any party to a conflict, even one deemed “terrorist”. In other words, providing humanitarian aid cannot be considered a crime.
IHL is integral to Canadian law. As party to the Geneva Conventions, Canada has an obligation to uphold IHL and must, according to recent United Nations Security Council resolutions, ensure that domestic counterterror legislation is compatible with IHL.
Canada's Supreme Court has similarly affirmed that the Criminal Code must be interpreted such that “innocent, socially useful or casual acts” with no criminal intent are not criminalized.
MSF acknowledges that Bill C-41 aims to facilitate rather than curtail humanitarian action. Unfortunately, Bill C-41 and the counterterror parts of the Criminal Code it relates to are, in their current formulation, inconsistent with IHL and Canadian law and will undermine Canadian humanitarianism.
Bill C-41 would require humanitarians to seek case-by-case permission for what they already have the legal right to do under IHL, but this is not simply duplication: The process itself in which authorization would be required from at least two ministries and up to nine governmental agencies would severely erode the practical agility, as well as the principles enshrined in IHL, that enable effective humanitarian aid delivery. Bill C-41's potentially onerous authorization process would divert humanitarian resources and delay our responsiveness in emergencies like the recent Syria-Turkey earthquake, where lives hang in the balance and every hour counts.
The process would also create an intelligence windfall for Canadian security agencies, including access to employee personal data that these agencies would otherwise not have reason to collect, data that could be used for purposes beyond the scope of Bill C-41. This would deter Canadians from working for humanitarian organizations.
Further, by placing humanitarians under unprecedented government scrutiny and control, Bill C-41 would compromise our independence as well as the neutrality upon which we depend to negotiate access and gain security assurances from armed groups. Moreover, denying authorization or directing where and what activities are permitted would profoundly undermine the fundamental principles of humanity and impartiality that guide our response on human needs alone.
Bill C-41 in its current form would embed a presumption of criminality in the Criminal Code, including for humanitarian action, by shifting the burden of proof of non-criminality onto the humanitarian actor. MSF believes this must and can be changed through a standing humanitarian exemption, clarified through relatively straightforward amendments to Bill C-41 that would effectively remove humanitarian action from the scope of criminality within the Criminal Code. A standing exemption would be consistent with IHL, UN Security Council resolutions, other states' counterterror laws, Canadian common law and Canada's reputation for humanitarianism.
Members of the committee, MSF worked in Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover, and continued after the takeover, on the same basis on which we work all over the world in places where state and non-state armed groups operate—the basis of international humanitarian law. MSF's purpose is solely humanitarian. For this we should neither be criminalized nor subject to the burden of continually seeking authorization for doing precisely what we exist to do.
Thank you.