Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to respond. I think that victims of torture deserve a right of civil redress no less than do victims of terror.
My only point was that from a legal point of view we could not commingle the two principles in the same bill without doing a disservice to both. Therefore, I introduced a private member's bill with respect to providing a civil remedy for victims of terror and I will be introducing shortly a private member's bill to provide a civil remedy for victims of torture.
In that way we will have two distinguishable, though related, bills with respect to the matter of principle, but in the matter of process we will be able to go forward effectively to secure the rights of victims of torture and terror respectively.
In the matter of the listing, I regard this as a fundamental issue because, as I said, it goes to the core of the principle of state immunity. The whole purpose of the government introducing its legislation and my introducing my legislation is to remove this operating principle of state immunity, so as to provide victims of terror a civil remedy which they cannot now have because of the State Immunity Act.
Therefore, if we are going to amend the State Immunity Act, we have to amend it in a way that gives an effective right of redress to victims of terror. If we keep the listing system, we not only deprive the victims of terror of an effective right of redress but we do not effectively deter the state perpetrators of terrorism and the state sponsors of terrorism because unless they are somehow arbitrarily put on that list, they themselves retain the immunity from suit.
Putting them on a list, as the government chooses to do, also invokes a kind of arbitrariness in the whole process. Therefore, to retain the principle of effectively amending the State Immunity Act to give victims of terror an effective right of redress, we strongly urge the government to remove the listing approach. Then we can combine to put together a bill that will serve the needs of victims of terror that will effectively deter terrorism, that will properly amend the State Immunity Act, and that will be consonant with both our domestic law, our international law, and the UN Security Council resolutions and the like that I referred to earlier in my preamble as a raison d'ĂȘtre to this legislation.