Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I guess it didn't come out in my bio that I spent half of the eighties and nineties working for Lawyers for Human Rights in South Africa. Having lived through those days gives me the right to be optimistic. Remember, we didn't have social media. We had an anti-apartheid movemen

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I think that the reason I wanted to focus on some of the things that Canada could do was to focus on the importance of grassroots organizations and their need for resources and funding. That 40-year and 70-country study that I talked about, by Htun and Weldon from 2012, really

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  In countries in conflict, the biggest correlation is actually between the level of state violence and the biggest human rights violations, particularly when it comes to places such as the DRC, for example, in terms of sexual and gender-based violence. In terms of literacy, I don

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I can't talk about the specifics of their work, but generally, as the Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders acknowledged the number of attacks, a lot of them are linked to the resistance that many of the indigenous women are carrying out against mining and massi

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I guess it's not a question of celebrating, to me, as much as acknowledging. We just had December 6 in Canada; we call it National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, and the slogan has always been “First we mourn, then we organize”. I see December 10 as an

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  First of all, I want to thank the committee very much for inviting me to appear before you, and I'm sorry I'm not there with you in person. I'm very pleased to appear before you to talk about this very important issue. I'm going to focus on women's human rights defenders. In Ap