I'm happy to. I think this is a great question. It's the kind of question that, as a former State Department and White House sanctions person, I wrestled with all the time.

I don't think there is a perfect answer here, but I'll give you my sense of both the effectiveness but also the moral dimension here. In my view, it's perfectly reasonable for sanctions to target individuals for gross human rights violations, to freeze their assets, and to deny them access to one's country. I see no reason why Canada should let the head of Evin prison or the lead torturer for the judiciary of Iran into Canada, or, frankly, into the United States.

The issue I have had is when the desire to target individuals for individual bad acts comes up to the state level. Here, like the other witness, I have some real concerns with making a decision that because there are human rights violations, we will not permit other kinds of issues to be addressed, or with putting all the various different world geostrategic issues on the balance for human rights. In my view, that's a decision that could be made, but I think that then you have issues of uniformity and of common global standards, which I think become a problem.

As you say, there is a bit of a dispute over the death penalty between us, and ultimately, I think that if you were to condition your ability to do business with the United States on that, it would be counterproductive for Canada and counterproductive for the United States.

To my mind, we need to decide the level of effectiveness that we think sanctions can bring, attached to the kind of global harm we see. In my view, human rights have not been proven at a state level to be an effective prompter of sanctions, and sanctions haven't been effective in resolving them. We've had very significant sanctions on Iran for its nuclear issues but also more broadly, and human rights in Iran are as bad as they've been. I don't think that is going to change because of sanctions being imposed from the outside.

Frankly, the sense of risk that a country faces over human rights, sanctions, regime change, and so forth could actually create an impetus for more human rights violations. I don't think that's necessarily a cycle that anyone wants to engage in.

In my view, in summary, I think that human rights on a personal level are a perfect reason to impose sanctions. I don't think anyone needs to invite into their country someone who's accused of gross human rights violations and so forth, but when it comes down to whether there are geostrategic issues that we need to sort out, as we've done with Saudi Arabia, with China, and with countries around the world, we sometimes have to hold our noses to deal with those larger issues. As the other witness said, that's where foreign policy prioritization comes into effect.

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