Mr. Tom Geraghty:

I want to return to the answer to the parliamentary question which the Vice Chairman read out as it goes to the heart of the matter. Nobody here suggests our negotiators were in any way slack with regard to including proper provisions for human rights in the treaty or that the EU was in any way remiss. This probably answers the question Deputy Mitchell posed on what the EU was doing. It did what it could in a discussion on a free trade agreement and tried to write in all types of guarantees about the protection of human rights.

However, the reality is these provisions cannot be implemented in the present situation in Colombia and this is absolutely apparent when one sees what happened with regard to the Colombia-US free trade treaty. Two Democratic representatives from the United States gave their verdict, having examined what happened to the provisions in the treaty between the US and Colombia, and their report is quite damning. The Colombian authorities are paying lip service to the provisions on human rights. They are doing so with the very seductive message, which needs to be clearly out in the open, that this is how to develop as social progress follows economic progress which in itself is facilitated through a free trade agreement and then and only then can one get to grips with human rights. In the meantime thousands of people will die. This is an inevitable fact given the nature of the society there because that is what has been happening consistently over the past 50 years.

Mr. Bunting and Deputy Byrne made the point that President Santos is considerably better than his predecessor, and there is no denying this. He has a vision for his country as being much more modern and open to international investment from which consequences will flow, whereas his predecessor had a much more closed view of the maintenance of a rather more traditional society. However, he is not interested in addressing human rights because he does not have to be. He understands his country can make trade agreements with the United States and the EU and agree to all sorts of things in respect of human rights and then not have to do anything about them.

If he is serious about developing his society into the type of modern society about which he speaks, his position would be strengthened, to answer Deputy Crowe's point, if he is told this cannot happen unless he does X, Y and Z and it is clearly spelled out, and not in the form of roadmaps referred to in the response to the parliamentary question. This is the type of language we heard from the earnest young women to whom I referred earlier, who spoke to us on behalf of the Government.

There is no shortage of roadmaps or declarations about what is required in respect of human rights. If paper could solve the problem of human rights in Colombia it could be turned into utopia. They have reports coming out of their ears about what they can or should be doing. The fact of the matter is it just does not happen. State forces continue to kill people with impunity. Until we get past this and get to a situation where state forces understand there are consequences if they murder their own citizens, that the rule of law will be applied to them rigorously and they will not be free to continue to do so, we will not address the problems of human rights in Colombia. This is a pressure point to try to force the people in control of the country to turn away from the lip service to human rights and actually make them do something about it. This could be a key to doing so because it is important to Colombia. If it was not important President Santos would not be visiting a number of states in the coming weeks.