Mr. Speaker, I am pleased that in the modernization of parliamentary proceedings, a change was made where during the adjournment proceedings the presenter and respondent were permitted to take a place that was opposite each other. Because there were so few people in the House it would give them a chance to have a dialogue. That change was adopted by the House and I am pleased that I had an opportunity to leave that fingerprint on this place.
Back in June I asked a question of the foreign affairs minister. It had to do with Mr. Huseyin Celil who had travelled to Uzbekistan, had been detained by the Uzbek authorities and had been sentenced in absentia to death in China for apparently alleged terrorist activities, et cetera.
I have had this conversation with the parliamentary secretary before, but it is timely that we have just come through a situation with the APEC meetings that the Prime Minister had an on again, off again, on again, off again meeting, albeit an informal one, 15 minutes long to discuss numerous issues. Interestingly enough the name that came up with regard to human rights was Huseyin Celil.
Mr. Celil has become the government's poster boy on the issue of human rights. I am really surprised that at the APEC meetings the Prime Minister chose Mr. Celil as the person whose case would be used with regard to our concerns for human rights.
Canada has a long tradition of defending the rights and freedoms of the individual. We have a Canadian citizen, Mr. Celil, an imam of the Muslim faith.
I had asked my question at a time when Mr. Celil had been detained by the Uzbek authorities. There is a relationship between Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, China and others. It is called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It is similar to Interpol. It basically says that if someone is in a jurisdiction and there is a quasi-Interpol notice that the person be detained, it will cooperate and have the person extradited to a jurisdiction.
The issue is that Mr. Celil was detained in Uzbekistan when he was there visiting with family members and he was going to be extradited. I asked the foreign affairs minister whether he would visit the ambassador in the U.S., since Canada does not have an ambassador from Uzbekistan, to negotiate the release of Mr. Celil and send a delegation to Uzbekistan to get Mr. Celil into Canada's hands. The answer from Uzbekistan was that it would have preferred to have Mr. Celil released to Canada but Canada had shown insufficient interest in the file.
After Mr. Celil has been extradited to China, why is it that now we are talking about Huseyin Celil when it is in fact too late?