Professor S. Michael Lynk:

In some ways, that very articulate question has provided part of the answer. I made that recommendation in my last report. It has also been a call of civil society. Palestinian civil society and Israeli civil society have asked for this. I believe it was a recommendation of both the Human Rights Watch report and the Amnesty International report. I claim no originality with respect to this, as long as the Deputy does not accuse me of plagiarism.

It was important to join these other reports and add this because the word "apartheid" to many people is an historical term. It is thought we now find it only in the history books on southern Africa. We have lost understanding of its definition, of how it can be practised and that it is not limited to southern Africa. When the international community created the Rome Statute of 1998, it was a forward-looking document. It was four years past the collapse of apartheid South Africa. It was meant to apply in a forward-looking way anywhere apartheid winded up existing in the world. The UN committee against apartheid had been around since the 1960s or 1970s and closed shop in the early or mid-1990s with the end of the final settler colonies in southern Africa that practised it.

To re-establish the committee would show the world's commitment to the recognition that apartheid can and, in at least one situation, does exist in the 21st century. The committee, like the occupied territories Bill, may have the Palestinian occupied territories in mind as a lead example, but it is not the only example of where goods coming from occupied territories, or illegally coming from civilian settlements therein, can exist. That is one of the beauties of the occupied territories Bill and it is the same thing with respect to the committee against apartheid.

The committee should be re-established and one of its features would be looking at the allegation that apartheid exists in the occupied Palestinian territories but it could look elsewhere as well. I am not in a position to say in detail or with confidence where else it may exist but, if these ugly features of history can re-emerge to our surprise in the 21st century, it is possible that they exist elsewhere as well. It is putting a stamp on the international community's expression of abhorrence that this still exists in the 21st century. That is why it is important and should have a global mandate, and not simply on the OPT.