Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you for hearing me.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  It's interesting. I've been doing this work for quite a while, and what you find when you do this kind of work is that we're not aware of our own cultural context a lot of the time, and we just assume things, or we understand things, or we see things in a certain way. In a lot of countries in the world where we talk about human rights, they view it from a different perspective because they've lived a different life.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes. It changes, but the Americans have been involved. So the Americans are involved. There are programs of support through USAID, and they have other programs of support. They have programs of support around dealing with drugs through the DEA. So the Americans have a presence and are involved.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I've always drawn a lot of comfort from the fact that you have within these systems people who worked under the old system and a lot of new people, a lot of young people. You find as you get into these positions that most of these investigators will be young people. They'll probably be people in their 20s.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I don't know. I have not followed that. I know there is a problem when they pass laws and they don't allow money, right? We've sometimes seen law as a political gesture with no functional implementation. What I do think has been happening is that with the primary focus around building these extra pieces, these new programs have been coming out of the tasa de seguridad, this fund they created.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I'm trying to think. I really don't know. I'm not aware. I know there have been what we would call certain major cases, the emblematic cases. There have been efforts on the part of the government to say that this is going to be investigated rigorously and they have actually put extra resources in.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  There are two levels of champions. There are the political level of champions or the leadership champions. When I look at what that means, the question is, if we meet with the current attorney general and we ask if they are prepared to do this and they say, “Yes, this make sense”, and they are willing to put the resources in, to me that represents that they are doing what they need to do.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I don't know how far they're willing to go. I do see that it represents the fact that they are concerned about their image and that they are concerned, at least when I talk to people, interminably, about the fact that they have to do something in order to deal with these human rights problems.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  At the end of the day, in addition to the technical support, there has to be political will, so there have to be some Honduran champions, ideally at the political level and at the leadership level. At the same time we find in a country like Honduras, as in other countries, that when you're dealing with 600 prosecutors, a lot of them are deeply committed and put their lives on the line.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I don't have the exact numbers, because I haven't been able to get them. When we started this work about six or seven years ago, most of the reports said that where they were getting murder convictions was in cases of flagrancia, where people were found committing. You might find if there's a domestic violence murder, say, that is an easier matter.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  The current project is going to end in June, but the project has been ongoing and we're in phase two of it, so we've been working in some of these countries for about six or seven years. We work in the three countries: Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. We had been doing work previously in Guatemala.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  The 50 is not Honduras alone. Excuse me, I was trying to show the region. You're dealing with about 16 murders a day in Honduras. In terms of the murder rate in Honduras, everybody fluctuates; whereas in Canada it is put at 1.8 per 100,000, it is pegged generally around 90 for Honduras.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Our belief is that where they get most of their arrests are on less serious crimes, and where they get most of their convictions are on less serious crimes found committing, flagrancia. We don't have the numbers, but my expectation is that we would certainly be dealing with less than 5%, and it might be as low as 2%.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Not really, because it is not really a police force, although the difference between Honduras and what Guatemala was doing is that the investigators of ATIC will actually be armed and they'll be able to make arrests. In that sense there will be police functions. But it is a different model, because it is a model that primarily is run by the prosecution service, which we would find very strange.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes.