Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses. I am a member of the Joint Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. That committee has discussed Colombia and the free trade agreement. I am a member of Sinn Féin and we wholeheartedly welcome the progress in the peace process. The North's Deputy First Minister, Mr. Martin McGuinness, MLA, who is a senior member of my party, and the Minister, Mr. Conor Murphy, MLA, have gone to Colombia at the invitation of President Santos. We have also met FARC representatives. We would have policy differences with President Santos, but we welcome that his re-election was an affirmation of the general will within Colombia to achieve peace.

We are being asked to ratify the free trade agreement. Even if we look at the news from Colombia this month, we see that human rights defenders have received death threats. The UN has asked the Colombian Government to dissociate itself from those death threats. We have seen peasant farmers killed by riot police and prisoners beaten up by guards. In recent years, trade unionists and human rights defenders in Colombia have been treated very badly with regard to their efforts to bring to light some of the major social inequalities that exist, and obviously some of the difficulties of indigenous peasants there.

Trade can be a tool to bring about social justice and human rights, but it is not necessarily so. Any free trade agreement needs to contain a mechanism to measure the changes happening in society to ensure trade has a correlation with improvements for citizens within a society. I do not believe this free trade agreement does that in any way. We met human rights lawyers who have been working in Colombia. We also met representatives of Christian Aid, Trócaire, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and Justice for Colombia. These highly respected social and citizen organisations in Ireland are calling for the free trade agreement not to be ratified, because they believe the ratification of the free trade agreement would not have the effect of relieving the oppression being experienced by people in Colombia. As late as in 2012, even the European Parliament called for the necessary mechanisms to measure changes to be included in free trade agreements. This agreement has no independent committee or body to measure those changes properly.

I believe Ireland would like to work with Colombia to increase our trade relationship. We would like this major humanitarian disaster not to be a stumbling block. The way to resolve it, from a Colombian perspective and perhaps from a European perspective, would be to ensure the necessary tools and infrastructure are within the free trade agreement to ensure there is a beneficial trend within human rights in Colombia. How can the Colombian Government work towards that before this is potentially ratified?