Mr. Speaker, the Maher Arar case is a very good case in point for why we have to be concerned about human rights. In that case, a Canadian citizen was deported from the U.S., not to Canada but to Syria. He languished in a Syrian prison and was tortured in that prison. Now we have a national public inquiry.
I just want to underline that this is why these treaties are important. We must have treaties that respect human rights for every single Canadian citizen or any citizen of the world, regardless of who that citizen is.
For the transfer of prisoners, for someone who may be watching, as I said earlier, under this bill there has to be an agreement by three parties: the prisoner himself or herself, the country in which the prisoner is in prison, and Canada. There has to be agreement by all three parties before that can occur.
We know that some of the conditions in some of the world's prisons are exceedingly bad and that some of the justice systems are very archaic in many prisons around the world. About 10 years ago today, I was in South Africa as part of a United Nations group that was observing the election in South Africa in the region of KwaZulu-Natal. One polling station was in a South African prison. Let me say that I would not want to wish that anybody spend any time in that kind of prison. We spent an hour or so in there observing that the voting practice was proper and so on. Some of those prison conditions are pretty deplorable and South Africa is by no means the worst of different countries in the world. Many years ago, I had a chance to visit a Chinese prison. Again, those were not exactly the kind of prisons that would be a model for the world.
I think this is a good bill. It is a step in the right direction. We must have a tough criminal justice system, but we also must have a system that respects basic human rights and basic decency in how we treat human beings.