Madam Speaker, it is an honour to speak to the motion today. I will be splitting my time with my friend and neighbour, the great member for Portage—Lisgar.
The reason the debate today is so important is that we want to talk about human rights, but we have to focus in on the great work that has been done by the Office of Religious Freedom under the leadership of the Ambassador Andrew Bennett. We need to remember that, when we look at most of the atrocities that have been committed around the world, when we look at most of the human rights violations that too many people have had the misfortune of experiencing, we see it always starts with an attack on religious freedom.
Not one of the countries today that have the worst human rights violations has freedom of religion or recognizes the people's right to choose which religion they want to practise.
It comes down to watching what is going on in the world today.
I was encouraged to see U.S. Secretary of State Kerry say this past week that what ISIS is doing in Iraq and Syria, and indeed around the world, is genocide. Its targets are religious minority groups. It is the Assyrian Orthodox, the Yazidis, and the Chaldean Christians. It is those groups ISIS is focusing on. It is Shia Muslims and progressive Muslims it is targeting. Anyone who will not accept ISIS' demented idea of religion and ideology, those are the ones whom it is not just persecuting but exterminating.
We have to take a strong stand to stop these types of atrocities, to stop this genocide in particular in Iraq and Syria. That is why our party has always supported being part of the combat mission to actually stop the genocide, to exercise our responsibility under the UN charter, which is the responsibility to protect, which was agreed to under the Geneva Convention. We have a responsibility, and that is why the Office of Religious Freedom that we established a few years ago in Canada is so important.
I want to talk from the standpoint of my experience of what we are seeing happen in Ukraine today. Despite some of the earlier comments made by the member for Windsor—Tecumseh, I want to make sure people understand that there has been a huge attack on religious freedoms in Russian-occupied Ukraine, whether it is in Crimea, in Dombass, or by their proxies like former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.
In Crimea, since the occupation began, when the little green men showed up on the streets in 2014, there was an immediate attack on the Muslim minority there, the indigenous Crimean Tatars. Almost systematically the government of Ukraine, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, as well as his proxies, his so-called Crimean self-defence forces in Crimea, made sure that they first went and shut down their mosques. Then they attacked their media, based upon their religion; so freedom of speech and freedom of the press were automatically shut down after they attacked their ability to worship.
They shut down the Crimean Tatars' newspapers, radio stations, and television stations. Then they attacked their right to assembly and shut down their legislative body, which they have enjoyed under the authority of the Ukrainian government in the autonomous region of Crimea, since Crimea and Ukraine became independent in 1991, their Mejlis, which is their legislative body where they elect leaders, make policy decisions, and advise the government of Ukraine as well as the government within Crimea on the type of things they need for their people, the Crimean Tatars.
Those attacks on their religion were all orchestrated by the Kremlin out of Moscow. Those attacks on their human rights—freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech—were all attacked by the Kremlin. We have to take a strong stance against these types of human rights violators.
That is why Andrew Bennett, the ambassador of the Office of Religious Freedom, travelled on numerous occasions to Ukraine to highlight the abuses that were occurring in Crimea by the Russian Federation. We have to applaud the Office of Religious Freedom for taking that type of leadership role, because on the other side of that, we have Russia Today, the Russian television that is broadcast into Canada, saying that the Mejlis, the Tatars' legislative assembly, is a terrorist organization. It said that the Tatars are not allowed to assemble in their mosques or Mejlis because they are planning unrest within Crimea. This just stinks of the time in 1942 to 1944 when the Soviet Union systematically tried to stomp out the Tatars' culture, their religion, and their ability to be within their homeland, by deporting them to the gulags in Siberia and eastern Russia. They were allowed to return in the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union's Iron Curtain began to crumple. They were allowed to go home to reclaim their properties and to re-establish themselves as a community under the leadership of the free and independent Ukraine. However, all of that has now been turned back. Crimean leaders have been arrested, many of them have disappeared, and that is very disturbing.
Amnesty International has made a number of different statements, along with Freedom House, on everything that is happening to the Tatar community in Crimea. Amnesty International has said that since the annexation by the Russian Federation, “the fundamental rights to freedom of assembly, association and expression have been repeatedly violated in Crimea”.
It further states:
The Crimean Tatars, recognized as the indigenous people of the peninsula prior to the deportation of their entire population to remote parts of the then Soviet Union in 1944, began the painstaking process of re-establishing themselves in Crimea in the late 1980s. It is the Crimean Tatar community which is bearing the brunt of the above violations.
Some of those leaders have been persecuted, and some are now living in Ukraine because they are fearful of returning to Crimea, like Mustafa Dzhemilev, who has been here and met with us in Canada and with whom I have met in Kiev on a number of occasions, a true leader of the Tatars and a true leader within the political circles of Ukraine, who is banned from Crimea. Ahtem Ciygöz, his successor to the Mejlis, is missing because he appeared at a protest against the Russian occupation and illegal annexation and took strong stands against what Putin was doing in Crimea. He was detained and has not been seen for some time, along with other Crimean leaders. Russia continues to violate religious freedoms in Ukraine.
Also, the Russian Federation has gone after the Greek Orthodox Church in Crimea. It has gone after members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, mainly because it believes that the Kiev patriarchate is not in concert with the Russian Orthodox Church because it often talks about the freedom and nationalism of Ukrainians. Again, the Canadian Office of Religious Freedom, under the leadership of Ambassador Bennett, has spoken out strongly against violations—for example, Greek Orthodox priests were beaten on the street, and 200,000 Greek Catholics within the Crimean area have fled the country because they feared for their safety.
It should also be mentioned that in Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, where the fighting is taking place, one of the first things the Russian proxies did was go to the synagogues and ask all Jews to register. It smacked of Nazism, it smacked of the fascism that was experienced in Germany leading up to World War II, and it is repeating itself in Ukraine today and being perpetrated by the Russian government.
Therefore, we need to continue to take a strong stand in support of religious freedom; otherwise we will not have human rights respected in those regions.