Mr. Speaker, 16 years ago the clarion call at the World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna was that women's rights are human rights, and human rights mean nothing if they do not include the rights of women.
Sixteen years later, not only are women's rights still not respected as human rights, but discrimination against women remains a form of gender apartheid, where vast numbers of people around the world are humiliated, tortured, mutilated and even murdered just because they are women.
Accordingly, I was pleased to participate in the first ever G8 conference on violence against women in Rome, which determined that violence against women is bound up with women's inequality; that combatting such violence must be a priority on our domestic and international justice agenda; that law on the books must be translated into law in action.
As Canada assumes the leadership of the G8, we must heed the Rome conference call of, “Respect women, respect the world”. There is no better place to begin than a national inquiry into the disappeared and murdered aboriginal women in Canada.