PARLIAMENT HILL—Canada needs to join an international effort to hold the world’s most abusive regimes to account.
That’s the opinion of Liberal justice and human rights critic Irwin Cotler. He wants Canada to take up an action plan to combat the culture of impunity at the United Nations and hold those responsible for systematic abuses to account.
That includes asking the UN to adopt two resolutions unanimously recommended by the Global Summit Against Discrimination and Persecution.
One resolution asks the international body to suspend the People’s Republic of China from the UN Human Rights Council and press the Chinese regime to address its own deplorable human rights record.
The other directs the UN to condemn the ongoing severe human rights abuses in Syria.
While China has veto power within the UN, and it is unlikely that the first resolution would pass, Cotler said there is a strategy to what looks like a futile effort.
“Andrei Sakharov, that great dissident in the former soviet Union, once said that one of the most important things you can do for the promotion and protection of human rights is the mobilization of shame against the human rights violator.
“What we want to do here ... is this mobilization of shame [so] that they cannot continue to violate human rights with impunity.”
While China could veto the actual resolution, it cannot stop the debate preceding it.
Cotler also wants Canada to join in the establishment of an inter-parliamentary group with MPs from around the world focused on promoting and protecting human rights in Iran.
NDP MP Wayne Marston, soon-to-be vice-chair of the House of Commons human rights subcommittee, said he supports Cotler’s effort to end impunity at the UN.
“There are governments in the world slaughtering their own citizens,” said Marston.
