Mr. Speaker, I will restart the quote I was reading. She said that one day,
[The guards] brought 200...[women] to the hall, and they picked out one young girl, about 20 years old, and they forced her to accept the guilt for something that she never had done. She was crying and she was saying that she was guilty even though she was not guilty. She accepted it in front of the 200 prisoners. Then the Chinese guards started raping her, one by one, in front of all these 200 prisoners. They went down the line and raped her one by one in front of all the people.
If some of these 200 prisoners showed pain on their faces or in their eyes, or hesitation or any negative emotion...they will pick these prisoners from the crowd and later they will start torturing them because they didn't change.
That is what is happening right now. Where is our feminist foreign policy? Ms. Sauytbay is just one of many who told this to the subcommittee.
Irwin Cotler later told the following to the subcommittee:
Genocide obliges us all—internationally, domestically, governments, parliaments, civil societies...to call out genocide. It's a responsibility under the genocide convention to both prevent and punish acts of genocide.
It would be first and foremost a responsibility for Parliament to define these acts targeting the Uighurs as constitutive of acts of genocide, as the witness testimony has so eloquently and compellingly conveyed before this committee...
The Prime Minister says that “genocide” is a loaded term and he is right. It is a loaded term. It is a term that should only be used to describe instances where genocide is clearly taking place, such as this one. The Prime Minister says he wants more evidence and he wants to send a fact-finding mission to China. This is disgraceful obfuscation. The facts have already been found. The evidence has been exposed and the experts agree. The Prime Minister knows that the Chinese regime will never allow unfettered access to do the required investigation.
If I could see through my window that my neighbour was being violently raped and killed by an intruder, would it really be okay for me to knock at the door and wait to be invited in to investigate?
The Prime Minister's reluctance to call out these crimes is all the more striking given the fact that he has previously accused Canada of committing a 21st century genocide. He said in 2019 that his government accepts that murders of indigenous women and girls in recent decades amount to genocide. Experts at the time, including Irwin Cotler, criticized this use of the term “genocide” saying, “I think we have to guard against using that term in too many ways because then it will cease to have the singular importance and horror that it warrants.”
Is it not then ironic that the Prime Minister of Canada is prepared to accuse his own country of genocide, even when some experts say otherwise, but unprepared to accuse the Government of China of genocide, even when the experts say otherwise? Far from having some natural filial attachment to his own country, the Prime Minister is willing to accuse his own country while unwilling to recognize a genocide in China when it is clearly taking place.
There can be no doubt that the Prime Minister's denial of the Uighur genocide has nothing to do with the evidence. I will not pretend to know his true motivations, but I hope that members of his caucus will be prepared to press him on the point, if not in public, then certainly in private.