Thank you to members of the Independent Senators Group for gifting me with some of their time today.

Honourable senators, I wish to bring to your attention two related human rights issues.

It is indeed an honour to welcome to this chamber Dr. Nazila Ghanea, the United Nations Special Rapporteur, or SR, on freedom of religion or belief.

To underscore their independence, UN SRs are unpaid, even though their work is arduous, requiring great skill and much time. Because she is clearly untiring, Dr. Ghanea does all of this while maintaining her full-time obligations as a professor of international human rights law at the University of Oxford, leading their master’s-level program.

Special rapporteurs are independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, mandated to identify existing and emerging obstacles to the free exercise of human rights. Rapporteurs conduct international fact-finding missions, investigate allegations of human rights violations and develop reasoned and impartial recommendations for cooperation and conflict resolution.

We seem to be facing an alarming erosion of human rights protections across the globe. As Canada’s Ambassador to the UN, the Honourable Bob Rae, recently stated:

So much work done by so many to centre humanity, strengthen institutions, and ultimately to build peace, is being lost more and more each day.

The work conducted by SRs counters this erosion. Their work strengthens the international rule of law, respecting human rights and dignity.

This leads me to highlight my second point of human rights — connected but closer to home.

Forty-three years ago yesterday, over 1,200 women from across this country — unwelcome, unpaid and largely uninvited — entered Room 200 of West Block and changed the constitutional course of this country. They came together because the Charter draft for the new Constitution was so weak, and they knew they had one last chance to make a major change.

This could not have happened on Parliament Hill were it not for the small number of women parliamentarians who came together across party lines and made sure they went through the proper procedures that we have to go through with our dear Black Rod. They did the same thing with the Sergeant-at-Arms.

In particular, I want to mention one of the very few women senators at that time, Conservative senator Martha Bielish. She went the extra mile. I was deeply involved in that conference and I can tell you that Flora MacDonald, Martha Bielish, Pauline Jewett and Margaret Mitchell were the parliamentarians who made it possible for women to meet on Parliament Hill.

There is a documentary entitled Constitute! that I recommend to you. There are two “notwithstanding” clauses. One is section 33, and many of you probably don’t know that section 28 is the sex equality guarantee that comes directly out of that ad hoc conference. It, too, begins with the word “notwithstanding.”

Thank you so much.