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May 9, 2008
Human rights sentry
MP talks about abuses in Darfur, China, Syria.
DAVE GORDON
Irwin Cotler, member of Parliament (Lib) from Mount Royal, Que., was in Toronto last week and spoke on international human rights abuses, among other related topics. The lecture, The Law and Human Rights: 21st-Century Challenges, was part of a business lunch lecture series of the Speakers Action Group, held in conjunction with the Jewish Civil Rights Association. Cotler, an international human rights lawyer, has in recent years taken steps to bring more attention to the genocide in Darfur. In this interview, he focuses on his topic of expertise: human rights.
JI: You've sponsored the Sudan Accountability Act C-536, that would have Canada divest economically from Sudan. China, as you note, buys Sudanese oil and provides the Sudanese with armaments. For those reasons, should Canada, and others, boycott the Beijing Olympics? If yes, how do we get Canada to do that?
IC: I was the one who spoke up against awarding the Olympics to Beijing. A number of us held a press conference at the time. Then, when the Olympics were awarded to Beijing, we said there should be a code of conduct to which Beijing should have to adhere. Where appropriate, there would be calibrated responses in that regard.
Where we are now, we've allowed too much to happen without sufficient forceful response. At this point in time, I don't think a boycott of the Games would be an appropriate response. I do feel that the athletes that have trained and those who have gotten to this point, four years later, should be allowed to compete.
However, government leaders should not dignify [the Chinese authorities] by being there for the opening ceremonies. They should be speaking out against what is happening in China. Not only in terms of China as an enabler of the Darfur genocide, but also Tibet, Burma and their domestic human rights violations ... and [we should] use the refrain "China, the whole world is watching."
JI: Many Syrian products can be found in department stores and supermarkets in Canada. How can we get Canada to register Syria as a terrorist-sponsoring state and/or economically boycott Syria because of its government's support for terrorism?
IC: One of the problems with trade restrictions is that you have so many countries involved in human rights violations ... are people going to be able to apply that equitably and uniformly? They're not going to stop the import of Chinese goods, for example. Can one go ahead and have selected targeted sanctions? That's a serious question because afterward the question would be, Why are you letting it happen with Syria, but not doing anything about China?
... When a Canadian citizen was being held [in prison] in Syria, I wrote a piece at the time in which I said that Canada should set forth and articulate a series of principles by which we will abide in regard to how other countries treat our nationals. That would include economic leverage. That's one way to ask: How are Canadian nationals being treated abroad?
We could start ... looking at gross state-sanctioned violations of human rights – state-sponsors of terrorism and state-inciters of hatred – those would be the countries which we'd have a different trade policy towards. But it would have to be a global policy which we would enact.
JI: A recent initiative of yours was for April 7 to mark the day the genocide in Rwanda began in 1994 – an annual Day of Reflection on the Prevention of Genocide. What is Canada doing, or should it be doing, to reflect this in hard policy?
IC: ... We needed to learn the lessons of the Rwandan genocide for the purposes of preventing genocide. There are four lessons. The first lesson was the danger of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide. The second was indifference and inaction: we knew what was happening in Rwanda but we did not intervene, similar with what is happening in Darfur. The third thing is the danger of genocide denial ... and that makes the pain harder to bear. Fourth, we have to prevent genocide because intervening after the fact is too late. If we remember these four lessons, maybe we can prevent future genocides from happening.
JI: When does your campaign to become prime minister officially begin?
IC: I'm never a candidate for that kind of office. I'm very happy being a member of Parliament and happy being the critic for human rights. We do what we can, wherever we are.
Dave Gordon is a freelance writer based in Toronto. His website is DaveGordonWrites.com.
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