Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and good afternoon, committee members. It's a pleasure to be here with you once again.

You will hear very little from me, because it's obviously most important that you hear from our two guests, who have come from afar. I'll just say a few words of introduction, and at the end I'll sum up with just a handful of key recommendations.

I want to introduce our two guests by sharing with you briefly a powerful personal moment I had during a human rights mission to Mexico last September. As part of Amnesty's ongoing Stop Torture campaign, I was there with a delegation that was doing some prison visits. I found myself in a maximum security prison in the state of Nayarit. I was there to visit not a kingpin in a Mexican drug cartel but a prisoner of conscience and a survivor of torture, Ángel Colón. At that time he had been imprisoned for nearly six years, unjustly. He had been severely tortured. He had experienced massive racism and discrimination.

Yet even with all of that, during that prison visit he touched me deeply with his sense of grace and his abiding confidence that justice would prevail. I was thrilled when five weeks later we received the news of his freedom. I couldn't be more thrilled that we now have an opportunity to have him with us here in Canada. He has been speaking to audiences in Toronto and Halifax, where we had our annual general meeting this year. It's so wonderful that he has now an opportunity to be here with you.

With him is Luis Tapia, a remarkable, very dedicated human rights lawyer in Mexico City with the tremendous human rights organization Centro Prodh—the “dh” standing for “human rights”—who has worked tirelessly on Ángel's case. Even though Ángel is free, as you'll hear from both of them, that does not mean the case is over. He still is struggling for justice for what he's been through. Both of them remain committed to curtailing torture more widely in the county.

I'd like to turn things over to Ángel, and then Luis.

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