Alex Neve Rights Quotations

The past record of standing back and allowing trade and investment to easily trump the human rights concerns can't stand,

There's clearly a range of international human rights concerns associated with flights of this description.

For far too many years Canada has been timid and reluctant to put human rights squarely on the table in meetings with the Chinese government, scared that pushing too hard on human rights might detract from trade and investment prospects.

If you're part of the chain of events that make that happen, then your human rights responsibility as a government are engaged.

Canada needs to take the human rights engagement with China to a concrete level and move beyond some of the very vague, general, easy platitudes we've heard in the past.

the human rights situation in China is suddenly going to turn around overnight...but it will be an important contribution to the kind of change we all want to see.

The coming days offer a critical chance to take a bold new step forward by raising these issues with confidence and without apology and asking for some concrete and time-bound human rights commitments in return.