Mr. Chair, I want to thank the hon. member, who is one of the most respected parliamentarians, for fighting for human rights around the world. His work is indeed very valuable. Today he very eloquently gave a very good insight into the situation of human rights abuses in Iran. He spoke about one of the areas which is of major concern to us which is the political prisoners in Iran.
As he knows, only last year, in 2014, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran came to Canada after he released his report. We had an opportunity to meet with him and listen to him about the situation in Iran. I want to inform the member that the UN Special Rapporteur will be coming later this month to Canada and I will be hosting a lunch for him. We will carry on with our conversation in reference to human rights in Iran.
As in his report, the UN Special Rapporteur mentioned that at least 895 prisoners of conscience and political prisoners were reportedly imprisoned in Iran. This includes political activists, religious practitioners, human rights defenders, civic activists, journalists, bloggers and student activists.
I agree with the member that we need to stand up and speak about political prisoners to ensure that they are freed, as he said in his remarks.
About a year ago, at the beginning of 2014, I was in Mongolia at a conference where I met with dissidents from Iran. We talked about how we can use social media to highlight many of the abuses that are taking place inside Iran. As mentioned, the Iranians are imprisoning journalists and have tight control over any kind of dissidence in Iran. However, we feel that through social media and so on, it is possible to get messages to the people in Iran on the situation of human rights and what the international community is doing.
I was wondering whether my good friend knows anything about this area and whether we can co-operate and work together to ensure that this is one of the areas where we can get information to the people inside Iran on what the regime is doing.