 It was a little bit hectic in my getting here on time, so I do apologize. But thank you for all being here tonight. Myself and the Snowden refugees, Mr. Snowden, we really appreciate your attendance here, the people watching on live stream, and the support for my clients. And just very briefly, in case there are a few people out there, I met Mr. Snowden in 2013, June in Hong Kong, and that's when he made the globally significant disclosures of the Five Eyes Electronic Mass Surveillance Program. And it was at that time that I represented Mr. Snowden in Hong Kong, and thereafter, and it was also at that time that I asked four brave adults, incredibly courageous adults who exercised decisions of conscience to provide Mr. Snowden with a refuge, with shelter, humanity, compassion, and caring. And to introduce them again briefly, Vanessa on the left, if you're facing the screen, from the Philippines to her right, to her left, Ajith, military deserter from Sri Lanka. Nadeeka from Sri Lanka, and on the far, far left, Supun from Sri Lanka. And these are the three children. On the bottom left is Kiana, and beside her is her stepsister, Satyamdi, and Supun is holding the little boy, Dinaf. What I'm going to do this evening, before providing a brief update on the Snowden refugee status, I'm going to go through a bit of law. I think at this stage there's been such marginalization, demonization, confusion about what refugees are and what is required to qualify as a refugee. I'm going to go through a number of international law, and at the same time, beyond that, I'm going to go through what's happening globally. And in my view, we're really at a crisis in terms of authoritarian leaders, democratically elected, and ignoring their constitutions, violating them, blatantly ignoring the international law. So very briefly, I've just listed some of the most crucial or core conventions that protect human rights, from the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights to the UN Convention Against Torture, and of course the UN Convention relating to the status of refugees in its protocol. I'm also mentioning the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, because this is a court where this court itself is now being attacked by states around the world, nations around the world. I'm also mentioning customary international law, which is an international norm where due to practice, the practice becomes so pervasive that countries no longer need to sign up to an international treaty. That treaty becomes part of customary law, it doesn't have to be written anywhere. Now, the core document I'm going to discuss is the Refugee Convention in Article 33, and subparagraph one is the core part of refugee protection, and that is no state shall expel, return, and the legal word is refowl, okay, means to return. So no state is going to, should return any refugee, and that also includes any refugee claimant out of their jurisdiction where their life or freedom are at risk. And that, the life and freedom also includes any serious harm. And there are five fundamental grounds to secure refugee status, race, religion, nationality, and political opinion. These are the classical four. There's a fifth called social group, and it's not a closed end category, it's actually open-ended, because as, you know, over time we recognize that different human rights abuses occur affecting different social groups that don't fall into the four classic categories. So just a review, just to interpret Article 33, as I mentioned, liberty and life also includes serious harm. It's a forward-looking test. So if an asylum-seeker or refugee crosses a border into another country, they don't need to prove that they actually suffered any harm or any threats or any risks. Any threats or harms or loss of liberty or serious harm before they leave their jurisdiction into another jurisdiction. That person has to show they're unable or unwilling to seek help from the police or the state, and that's quite often the case because of corruption or the state itself is the persecutor. And there must be a nexus to one of the five grounds. I'm going to focus on political opinion, and political opinion can be expressed by an individual verbally through their physical actions, the presence with others. And political opinion is connected to the right of freedom of expression. And one thing I would stress is that freedom of expression under the law is not just your right to say something. It's also your right to receive information, to be present, to be able to hear and listen or record. And the freedom of expression connects fundamentally to freedom of association, assembly, and mobility. A lot of people misunderstand that persecution for political opinion is that the opinion comes from the persecuted person. In fact, the Refugee Convention clearly states it is the opinion of the persecutor that counts. So for example, I've had clients from South Asia. One case was of a farmer who just had no political opinion but was at a rally in a public place and just was standing on a corner and was unaware there was a political opponent standing near him. Those in power saw my client inferred that my client must be supporting the opposition and from that day onward persecuted him, burned down his house, destroyed his farm, and he fled for his life. So the legal test is the opinion or the perception of the persecutor. Now I'd like to go to the social group category. This is really important because this relates to some of my clients and in particular the Snowden Refugees. And a social group is a particular group of people that are connected or linked through a shared characteristic or there's a perception by society that they, you know, having certain characteristics that they form a group. These characteristics are typically historical and relate fundamentally to an individual's identity and conscience. Usually they're unchangeable and if they're not unchangeable, that person should not have to change those characteristics because they are fundamental to their identity or conscience. If they can be changed, they still should not be changed because they're linked to that person's fundamental exercise of human rights. The Snowden Refugees fall into the social group category. Aside from having claims with Hong Kong and the Canadian government under political opinion for supporting helping Mr. Snowden, they form the unique social group that I think everyone in the world recognizes. They are the Snowden Refugees and the social group are individuals that protect whistleblowers. That's the social category. One thing I'll stress is that we hear about whistleblowers and public support for whistleblowers that protection, public support for journalists to carry out their duties quite often working or reporting what whistleblowers want to disclose. But there is not enough in terms of legal applications, there's not enough in terms of public awareness the importance of the average individual on the street, anybody on the street who may one day be faced with what the Snowden Refugees were faced with and make extraordinary decisions of conscience to help a whistleblower. I'm mentioning the CAT Convention, the United Nations Convention on Torture. Torture is a non-derrigable right. Not to be tortured is a non-derrigable right. There is no circumstances that exist that can justify any state or private party torturing an individual. And I also mentioned the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the three core rights here are the right to life and that it should not be arbitrarily taken. Tortures repeated here but also cruel and human or degrading treatment or punishment. And this is a non-derrigable right. No one should ever be subjected to this. And then the last one I'm going to mention, I apologize, is liberty and security, in particular, arbitrary arrest and arbitrary detention. And as we see globally today, countries are around the world where there's mass protests against government corruption, government abuses, a lack of freedoms. Governments are using arbitrary arrest and detention to make people disappear to shut them up. Now I need to mention or point to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in there, as well as Article 31 of the Refugee Convention, that every refugee claimant has an absolute right to cross a border if they're at risk of losing their liberty, their life or serious harm. And unfortunately, we're living in a world today where countries that are around the world are putting up walls that are real, walls that are virtual, because they do not want to address or comply with their international obligations to help the most vulnerable. And what nation-states are doing is they're using propaganda, inaccurate information, false information to criminalize legitimate asylum seekers and refugees, to try to categorize them as illegal immigrants, economic migrants. And with all of this, we're seeing an erosion of international law and constitutional law. And one area where nations have been very clever is they've been using a strategy of constructive refalement. Now, refalement means to return. And in Hong Kong, for example, the government achieves constructive refalement, which basically means they create an environment that makes it intolerable for an individual to remain in that jurisdiction. And in the end, that person's mental and physical integrity is so compromised, they make a decision to return their home country to take a risk to whether they're gonna live or die or lose their liberty or not. So in Hong Kong, for example, the government does not provide full humanitarian assistance, they criminalize work, there's no education allowed for adults. And employment is prohibited, so that there's no way for the individual to be making money or participating in a meaningful way in society. And in the end, that person becomes so compromised, they decide to leave. So the governments create these circumstances to violate their constitutional rights, international legal rights by making them leave, by making the circumstances intolerable. You're seeing a global trend of criminalization and ill treatment of asylum seekers. You've seen similar legislative and policy and propaganda frameworks in Austria, Denmark and Hungary. We've all seen the asylum seekers who've lost their lives crossing the Mediterranean. In the United States, we've seen separation of children. Separated from families, a tactic used by the US government. The children held in detention centers deprived of blankets, soap, toothpaste. A lack of monitoring and care for the welfare and health of these children, some have died. And more recently, and this is a tactic also used by the Hong Kong government, but in a different way, asylum seekers who are outside the US jurisdiction, the immigration officers put incorrect addresses recorded in the system so that they cannot receive legal notifications from the US government. You've seen the same thing in Hong Kong. On our first hand, I've seen asylum seekers go to the immigration and removal assessment section, try to hand in a document stating that they're raising a claim as a protection claimant for refugee status or torture. And there are security guards at the door that tell them go away, it's not acceptable. Not immigration officers. And if they do manage to submit raising their refugee asylum claims, I've had too many clients who've been told you're not using the right words to raise a claim that you're afraid you're gonna die or you're afraid you're gonna be hurt. So these are tactics that deny what I would describe the due process rights of these vulnerable groups. And I do want to mention Thailand in terms of the treatment of asylum seekers and that they have found mass graves and Thailand has been complicit in human trafficking of the Rohingya. Now there's a few quotes I'd like to read and this is from the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. And it was right for us not just to have remembered Mandela's greatness but to have almost unconsciously contrasted it with all the narrow politicians who continue to proliferate across the face of the world. Authoritarian in nature, many of them are wily political infighters but most are of the thin mind and faint humanity. Prone to fan division and intolerance and just for the sake of securing their political ambition. While some do this more openly than others, all are well aware what they practice comes at the expense of vulnerable humans. And the UN High Commissioner goes on to state, to them I say you may seize power or stubbornly hold onto it by playing on and stoking the fears of your followers. You may congratulate yourselves for this and you may think yourself so clever for it but we know all you've done is to copy the behavior of previous generations of once strong but ultimately catastrophic leaders and politicians. Yours will in the end become a mouse-like global reputation, never the fine example of the leader you think you are and never even close to a Mandela. To deserve global respect you must begin to follow his example committing to the spirit and letter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hong Kong does not recognize the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hong Kong doesn't recognize the UN Convention relating to the status of refugees. Michelle Bachelet, the current UN High Commissioner, she stated earlier this year, the report outlines our efforts to assist states to uphold all human rights at a time when humanity faces many serious challenges. These include the existential threat of climate change, technological developments, unbearable civilian suffering in multiple armed conflicts, displacement, youth unemployment, structural economic injustices, xenophobia and hate speech and a focus of my statement today gross inequalities. Ms. Bachelet continues focusing on these inequalities and I'm just going to read at the bottom. Yet in several cases they are being met with violent and excessive force, arbitrary detentions, torture and even alleged summary of existential killings. People are protesting, people are protesting at the behavior of government and authoritarian leaders. And I put my mind to how to describe what's going on and the best way I've been able to describe it is that these authoritarian leaders, democratic elected have become unhinged, disconnected from the populace and most recently Ms. Bachelet has talked about global protests and she stated just a few months ago, I fear that we are moving further away from the global solutions to global problems due to two clear trends that are taking us in the opposite directions. Today in places with very different circumstances, level of development and political situations, we're seeing an outpouring of popular discontent and mass protests or their suppression with the firm hand of the state. In every region and Hong Kong's included in here and I'll just move forward, we see the desperate need for dialogue. The use of unnecessary and disproportionate force against people holding dissenting views and arrests of individuals exercising their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly can only exacerbate tensions, seriously undermining the space for dialogue. In my view, we are in crisis, there is a global crisis. What I thought I would do is to give some tangible examples through the case work I do. Narendra Modi, his platform has been Hindu nationalism and that's been at the expense of religious minorities and ethnic minorities in India, in particular the Muslim population and what Modi has done and this is a thread that runs through what happens in other jurisdictions including Hong Kong is when you have nationalism and minorities are targeted by the government or they're discriminated against, third parties in the private sector or related to politicians act on their own and when the state allows that to happen, we call that state acquiescence and in India, that's what we're seeing. Just coming back here, recently there was a deprivation of citizenship of 1.9 million people in a Sam state, an arbitrary act by Modi's government and as of last week, there was a new bill enacted into law granting citizenship to Hindus, Buddhists and Christians from certain South Asian countries, but it excludes Muslims and it also excludes the Sri Lankan Tamils for which there's a huge number of refugees who had fled from Sri Lanka and what Modi has done is all contrary to articles 15 up to 28 and that's prohibition of discrimination based on religion, race and place of birth. The tactics used by governments today in doing what Modi has done, it's being used all over the world. The executive branch or the legislature passes legislation that's unconstitutional and it may take a year or two or three years before a court strikes it down but during that gap period, those people who are discriminated against or persecuted suffer. Often they have to flee their homes, they have to flee their country or they're hurt or they're killed. So this is another way that Democratic elected leaders are utilizing the government and the legal system to strip away constitutional rights and rights under international law. Sri Lanka, extraordinarily good by a Rajapaksa, accused of war crimes, crimes against Manila and genocide was elected as Sri Lankan's new president just a month ago. In 1987 to 1990, he was the commanding officer in charge of the Mathalay district where about eight years ago they found mass graves. In 2009, he was accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. At the end of the war, bombing hospitals, civilian hospitals where there were Tamils, extrajudicial killings, summary executions. It's, and the platform of Rajapaksa was based on ethnicity and nationalism and the Philippines. Didarte came to power in 2016. It was on the platform that he would carry out mass, extrajudicial killings against drug addicts and drug traffickers. He had done that when he was mayor of Davao city in southern Philippines. And in June 2016, when he took power as president of the country, he did exactly that to over 20,000 Filipinos executed. The president of the Philippines, the government have threatened NGOs, human rights activists, ethnic minorities, Catholic church and even UN special rapporteurs. And stunningly, Doarte was actually filmed, this was televised, where in his campaign and basically committing crimes against humanity, he said if Germany had Hitler, the Philippines would have, he said pausing and pointing to himself. Hitler massacred three million Jews, there's three million drug addicts. There are, I'd be happy to slaughter them. And a year later, Donald Trump congratulated Doarte on his war on drugs. UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people, Victoria Tali Corpus, she fled the jurisdiction because Doarte put her name on a terrorist list. This is about state acquiescence to human rights violations. When a government puts an individual's name on a list and what happened in the Philippines, private parties took the law into their own hands and executed a number of people, assassinated them. So that was the fear for the UN special rapporteur and she fled the jurisdiction. Complaints were filed with the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity against Doarte. And also this UN special rapporteur, Agnes Calamard on summary and extraditional killings. Both the International Criminal Court prosecutor was threatened by Doarte and also the UN special rapporteur. Most significantly, the ICC prosecutor was threatened with arrest if she came to the Philippines to investigate. She'd be assaulted and she'd be killed. She'd be fed to the crocodiles. Philippines officially withdrew from the International Criminal Court, but that still does not protect President Doarte. Doarte may have committed possible war crimes. I've mentioned a few here, particularly calling for horrific crimes to be committed against women. And the People's Republic of China has been a great supporter of Doarte and it's understood that because of the provisions under the Rome Statue for the International Criminal Court that Doarte would not be prosecuted, China would use its veto power in the International Criminal Court to prevent any prosecution of him. Again, this is an example of how states are interfering with violating or making international law useless. The People's Republic of China, the most pressing example are the current concentration of Chinese military detention camps in China of the Uyghur Muslims. And despite the China cable satellite images and witnesses, China denies that they've arbitrarily arrested, arbitrarily detained, and disappeared over a million Uyghurs from Xinjiang province. I'd like to mention Hong Kong very briefly. And Hong Kong has had a history of violating the Constitution and international law from the Samuel Sadie extraordinary edition where Hong Kong deprived Mr. Sadie of all his due process rights and his protections under international law and handed him over to the UK and US government on a rendition flight in 2004. And that was the incident that put fear that made, that gave me great concern when Mr. Snowden was in Hong Kong. That the Hong Kong government could not be trusted to uphold its constitution, to uphold international law. 2014 Occupy of Protests, Ken Zhang, a politician, he was hog-tied, hands tied behind his back and his legs and tortured by the police and it was caught on video. And these officers were convicted, but then the police compared themselves to being persecuted as the Jewish people had during the Holocaust and that's on video that's been publicly recorded. And 2018, Alan Lee and Ray Wong fled Hong Kong in fear for their liberty and their safety and they were granted refugee status by the German government, which was the right thing to do and this caused a lot of outrage of the Hong Kong government and Beijing. And right now we have the Hong Kong protests, including arbitrary arrest, arbitrary detention, cruel and inhuman degrading treatment and punishment, torture, enforced disappearances, cases of rape by the police and actual extra judicial killings. I'm going to skip this. I still have clients, my clients in Hong Kong, the Snowden refugees. And fortunately this March of this year, Vanessa Rodell and her daughter, Kiana, safely arrived in Canada having been granted refugee status. This was a seven and a half year battle, seven and a half years. And the one thing I'll say is that so many people gave up, so many people said to me, you're not gonna win, it's taken too long, why don't you just move on with other cases? Anyways, I believed that we'd be successful and we have Kiana in this photo. This is Kiana on her father's lap and her father is still in Hong Kong with her brother and sister, Setem Di and Dinaf. And we would like to see this family being reunited in Canada. And we're asking Canada to act fast, as fast as possible. She has a sister who only thinks about, in Hong Kong, Setem Di, who only thinks about being reunited with Kiana in Montreal. And at this time with the police abuses, the government abuses in Hong Kong, Setem Di has been traumatized and she suffered permanent damage. The whole family is afraid, they live in fear and they are at heightened risk with the lawlessness in Hong Kong. The lawlessness by the Hong Kong police. I just wanna share this picture, which was taken by Jane Russell in August this year. This is the Hong Kong police tactical unit in Fanling. And you'll notice that there's no Hong Kong flag. And Jane Russell photojournalist pointed this out and it was at that point, we all realized that the hand of Beijing was apparently acting directly inside Hong Kong, directing the Hong Kong police. What's happened in Hong Kong is the same thing that you see in Sri Lanka, in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India. Where the government allows the police to commit abuses. State sanctioned, or the police commit abuses and the government turns a blind eye. And that amounts to state acquiescence. And what's happened in Hong Kong is what you see classically in Sri Lanka, or the Philippines. Where third private parties take the law into their own hands and go after innocent civilians or peaceful protesters. Hong Kong has become a very dangerous place today. And my clients' lives are at risk, at a heightened risk. I thought I would share this image taken by Kiana's father of, set them the Indian flag. The Nath during the protests. And this is what these children are growing up in this kind of environment right now. Where, really where they should be, is in this environment. And this is Vanessa and Kiana in Montreal, Quebec. No, just earlier this month. Now what I'd like to do in saying that is I'd like to invite Mr. Snowden to join us. Can anyone hear me? Thank you. We have very little time. So let me first give thanks to Robert Thibault. I know it's not always fun for everybody to sit through what is effectively a long lecture about what's wrong with the world. But these things matter. And it's important that we remember how they get better. I've been thinking a lot this year in writing my book, Permanent Record and After, about the state of the world and the direction of our future. I trust that each of you will understand that in 2019 this was not an especially enjoyable activity. But it's necessary. And one of the bright spots for me in this increasingly dark world has been the fact that people like you, that CCC has supported these families over the last few years, they made a difference for me. Think about what would have happened if I wouldn't have been able to get off the street. Think about what might have happened to me. I think about the fact that I wouldn't be able to talk to you today in all these years since the book that I wrote would not exist. It might seem like a small thing to you to give a donation to help out. But I believe that it really has genuinely changed the future of these brave families in a positive way. And so when I'm thinking about everything that's broken in the world, it got me thinking about the lessons that can be taken from that and how they fit into a larger framework. We have a pretty limited time here so I'm gonna do something a little bit unusual to try to summarize and read a little passage from the book. What makes a life? It's more than what we say, more even than what we do. A life is also about what we love and what we believe in. For me, what I love and believe in the most is connection, human connection, and the technologies by which that's achieved. Those technologies include books, of course, but for my generation, connection has largely meant the internet. Now, before a lot of you recoil knowing how broken the internet, the toxic madness that's all over it, understand that for me, as it was, for I believe many of you, when I came to know it, the internet was a very different thing. It was a friend and a parent. It was a community without border or limit. One voice and millions, a common frontier that had been settled but not exploited by diverse tribes living amicably enough side by side, each member of which was free to choose their own name and history and culture. Everyone wore masks and yet this culture of anonymity through polyonomy produced more truth than falsehood because it was creative and cooperative rather than commercial and competitive. Certainly there was conflict, but it was outweighed by goodwill and good feelings, the true pioneering spirit. You'll understand then why I say that the internet of today is in many ways unrecognizable. It's worth noting that this change has been a conscious choice, the result of a systematic effort on the part of a privileged few. The early rush to turn commerce into e-commerce quickly led to a bubble and then just after the term of the millennium to a collapse. After that, companies realized the people who went online were far less interested in spending than in sharing and that the human connection the internet made possible could be monetized. If most of what people wanted to do online was to be able to tell their family and their friends and strangers what they were up to and to be told what their family friends and strangers were up to in return, then all companies had to do to figure out how to put themselves in the middle of those social exchanges and turn them into profit. This was the beginning of surveillance capitalism and the end of the internet, as I know it. Now it was the creative web that collapsed as countless beautiful, difficult, individualized websites were shuttered. The promise of convenience led people to exchange their personal sites which demanded constant and laborious upkeep as you all know for a Facebook page and a Gmail account. The appearance of ownership was easy to mistake for the reality of it. But few of us understood it at the time. None of the things that we'd go on to share would belong to us anymore. The successors to the e-commerce companies that had failed because they couldn't find anything to sell that we were interested in they now had a new product to sell and that product was us. Our attention, our activities, our locations, our desires, everything about us that we revealed knowingly or unknowingly with or without consent was being surveilled and sold in secret so as to delay the inevitable feeling of violation that is for most of us arriving now. And this surveillance would go on to be actively encouraged and even funded by an army of governments greedy for the vast volume of intelligence that they would gain from these practices aside from logins and financial transactions hardly any communications were encrypted in the early 20 odds which meant that in many cases governments didn't need to even bother approaching the companies that were running these platforms in order to know what their customers were doing. They could just spy on the world without telling a soul. And now I ask you, is this what the world should look like? And how did this come to be? We were there. We were watching. And we thought we controlled the system. We thought we ran the system. We thought it was our internet. But here we are. You know surveillance after all is less about safety than it is about control. And when you look around at the union of technical and political systems today, it seems that they intend less to serve us than for us to serve them. And it's funny talking about this at CCC because to me it feels like a hack. You know what is hacking? I'm not sure you guys all have different definitions but in my definition, it's not just programming, of course, so we wouldn't see terms like biohacking. Hacking is about rules and the distance between how they are believed to operate and how they operate in fact. Hacking for me means coming to understand a system better than its creators or its operators and using that understanding to produce impossible results. Unexpected behavior. Now we like to think about hacks in a positive light but in the case of these last few decades, it's our society that was hacked. It is the whole of our network. It is the internet itself that they exploited. And see that that's the thing. The choices that we make and the things that you do, they have power and doing nothing, that's a choice. Now a lot of us like to think it's a willing choice. We like to think that we're the sole captains of our own destiny and that's the way it's supposed to be. That's the way it was intended. That's the way we designed the system. And yet the system today, somehow the actors within it spend an enormous amount of energy trying to make you forget that the things you do affect the outcome. They'll tell you not to worry about it, that it's not so bad. After all, it could be worse. But I say to you, it could be better. And every time we hear those words, that's what we need to say. Every system in history, even the most powerful, has been subject to change. And every hack that is performed against us can face a patch and more in all of the trouble to which these people have gone to make the people broadly forget their own power. They have forgotten something that I think is fundamental. We can hack back. They run the system. They may have won today. But I've been thinking about this. Look, we all know the history and it's been a dark time. But I'm here today in front of you to say that tomorrow will be ours. Change is coming and it is coming from people who pay attention, people who care. It will come from people like you who took the time out of their day, out of their lives, the money out of their pocket to travel the time, the minutes of your life to be here today, standing in solidarity, talking, learning, sharing to show that this broken world could very well be better. We can change it. We can change everything, one system, one rule at a time. Thank you. Just if it's not apparent, I no longer have audio, so I'm afraid I won't be able to hang on. Ed, we've got Vanessa on the screen, half the screen with you right now. And she's on video live from Montreal. And can you... Just if it's not clear, I can't hear anything anyone's saying. So I'm a bystander now. I'm gonna go to the stream. And hopefully Robert and Vanessa can help us with the Q and A. Ed, do you wanna do a quick Q and A right now? Or do you wanna... We've lost Ed. All right, so, yeah, so Vanessa's in Montreal and I've invited her here today. And so why don't we just start with the Q and A? This is really... It's Vanessa's first year after a decade and a half being under very difficult circumstances. Awesome, you know the drill. We have microphones in the halls. Please line up behind them if you have question for Robert Thibault or Vanessa. And hopefully Mr. Snowden will join us again. I think we're working on that in the background. Do we have questions from the internet so far? Yes, that is the case. So, signal angel, please give us a question. Do you think that whistleblowing could have prevented fascist regimes in the past and that it will be more important in the near future for the same reason? Questions for me, I'm assuming, yeah. Whistleblowing has always occurred in the past and it has brought about change. Historically, there are recorded cases but the difficulties in the past were the lack of protections. Quite often whistleblowers had to leave the jurisdiction. They end up being killed and really it's only in recent history and in particular with Edward Snowden's whistleblowing that governments around the world including the European Union as a whole recognize that there needs to be changed, there needs to be more protections. But we're also seeing that nations are providing enhanced whistleblower protections but on the commercial civil side and they're still lagging significantly where there's whistleblowing outing governments that behave egregiously or criminally as in Mr. Snowden's case. So, more than ever whistleblowing will remain and will continue to be a crucial part of ensuring government accountability and transparency. But for whistleblowers to step forward a couple things have to happen. Society needs to be stepping up and demanding government that there be protections for whistleblowers particularly like Mr. Snowden. And secondly, we've seen the government go after the Snowden refugees and made their lives intolerable, their existence intolerable in Hong Kong. And the delay of so many years to get Vanessa and Kiana's on the screen now into Canada and the other families here in Hong Kong who are suffering right now was the global leadership saying don't protect a whistleblower because this is what's gonna happen to you. So, I hope that Vanessa and Kiana's arrival and refuge in Canada to safety and security is an example for the whole world that there will be more whistleblowers but there also needs to be people in the general population who say look we need to support them and to take steps to make sure whistleblowers can remain safe but also in democratic systems to put pressure on government to make changes in the whistleblower protections. Thank you a lot for this detailed answer. We have some more questions but before we continue with them I would like to ask all of you to stay seated and stay quiet. Some people are leaving already the hall, please don't and please stay quiet so we can enjoy the last minutes of this lovely Q&A. You can also ask questions to Vanessa who played a crucial role in sheltering Mr. Snowden back in Hong Kong and for now I would like to hear a question from microphone number three. Hi, I'm Farhan, I'm a Pakistani journalist in exile. So thank you for the talk, it's been super inspiring. My question to Vanessa is that looking back now that everything that you suffered would you say that if you were given a choice that you could do this all over again and not do this at all, which one would you choose? If I have a chance again, I would say no, no. Everything what's happened, I think I will take this chance because after everything that's happened I'm here in China to save and I'm safe. So there's the big thing about that I would say but I'm very thankful to be here in Canada and as far as I know it's coming support us until we have here in Canada and we could start our new life in Montreal. Can we have another question from the internet? It's a question for Vanessa. How are you settling down in Montreal and has the community received you well? I'm settling in Canada is just like I'm saying because for me it's the hardest for me. People here is very happy here a lot. They're very supportive and if you don't know how to you just ask NGO to help me. Can they hear her? Thank you for this answer. Do we have more questions in the hall? I have a microphone that I can't see you right now. If you do, I think that's not the case. Single entry do we have one more question from you? Oh wait, microphone number two please go ahead. I don't know which one of you can answer that but what's causing the delay? Why is the family still separated? Is there any indication why Canada doesn't process the search for asylum? I want to put this on last. The Snowden refugee cases it has been a long delay and it's been too long and at this stage the Canadian government is progressing with the cases and these are complex cases. At this stage that's all I can really say. We all want the other families. We want the two children, Canada's brother and sister and we want to jeathe the former soldier. We want them in Canada, we want them in at the earliest time and this is really the only solution, it's the right solution for these extraordinary people. Thank you. So apparently we have Edward Snowden back. The correction is established again and if there is a question for him then please run to a microphone because that's your only chance. That's probably the last question of this session. Microphone number four, would your question qualify? Yes, I think so. Thank you everybody. My question quick. Mrs. Snowden you said we should put pressure and make change and do you think we should pressure our own government locally or should we pressure our government to pressure other governments? So for example, which sanctions to these countries that Mr. Tybal mentioned, that's the question. Yeah, I think we need to look at where can we be the most effective? This is a difficult question I think for people who are in advanced democracies because you see all the terrible things that are happening all over the world. You see the situation in Russia, you see the situation in China, you see the Russian situation in Iran and North Korea. And of course where you can make a difference I think you always should act. Even in my case there have been things where I have been criticizing of course the Russian government even though I live here, even though it's dangerous to do. I don't think there's much likelihood that the Russian government is likely to listen to me. I don't think there's much likelihood that the Russian people will listen to me in that circumstance because I'm not Russian. I don't speak the language, I can't persuade them. But you can persuade the people that you're around. You can persuade the community. And that's really when we talk about hacking, when we talk about systems, right? The whole thing that they used against us was that they thought, we thought the system, our democracy, our methods of voting, our methods of policing the internet, of managing and sharing our communications worked in a certain way. And how they were actually being used, how they were actually being implemented, how they were actually being operated. In many cases against us that was not clear. In secrecy in many cases was responsible for this. But when you talk about where you can make the most difference, it's in this room. It's the friendships you make that you take with you. It's the networks of solidarity and influence that you build. The sharing of skill sets and cooperation that will allow you to influence people even outside your areas of expertise, going to politics, going to local officials, using the local officials to get to the state officials, using the state officials to get to national, using the national to get to the international. What we have to do is we have to take a hard look at how the world actually operates today. Not how we want it to operate, not how we think it operates, but to measure it, to see how it's actually functioning, to see where the money goes, to see who's using it, to see where the influence is. And in many cases to seize control of that via whatever means that we have available to us. This is where we look at the technical systems that the people in this room have an extraordinary amount of influence over that we may not have in the political realm. If you make a protocol and that gets used around the world, you can provide the same guarantees, the same protection to someone in China, to someone in Russia that they have in Germany. Because technology can be agnostic to its use. If we make these carve-outs, if we make these sort of emissions, if we make concessions to power, to system, to government, to institutions, we have to think about how they will be used. The more rules in a system, the more lines of complexity there are, the greater the unseen attack surface that they can be used against us. We need to design for tomorrow. But there's no time to wait. We need to be working today. And if I could just say one thing, thank you everyone for your patience and for bearing with us through all of this. I'm going to shut up and give this back to Robert. But everybody asks, you know, how can I make a difference? This is all very good. It's very abstract. Again, be opportunistic. Look at where you can make a difference right now. And in the case of these families, we are almost across the finish line. We have been in this fight for years, and we are about to win. We can do it with your help. So please, if you can support them, do. Thank you. I have to extend a huge thanks to you, Mr. Robert Thibault. To you, Edward Snowden, thank you for coming on our stream. And thank you, Vanessa, for coming to us as well. This was a lovely event. Mrs. Snowden asked you to help, and this is how. This is how. Robert, if you'd like to say some last words? I would. This has been a long fight. We're in the eighth year now. And there's no way that we're going to get to the finish line unless donations are made, whatever you can help with. If it's a small amount of change, that's fine. If you can donate something more significantly, of course, that's going to help. But it's all about food, rent, utilities. And also, for Vanessa and Kiana and Montreal, the NGO is under legal obligation to continue to support them financially for the first full year that they're in Montreal. And they do need that support. One thing all stresses, the climate has been a big shock for Vanessa and Kiana. And it costs a lot of money to get winter jackets or jackets for autumn, shoes, boots. So at times, it's been rough for them. But one solution is the donations that make sure they have warm clothes and food, et cetera. And of course, the clients in Hong Kong, they have almost no humanitarian support. So if you can donate, we continue to donate. We all appreciate this. And thank you so much.