 Thank you very much. So I started sharing my screen with my very basic PowerPoint presentation. As the title of my presentation implies, I will discuss issues of state and individual responsibility pertaining to Canada's treatment of Indigenous people. The starting point of my discussion is the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. You might have seen the headlines, and I've made a very basic PowerPoint where you can see some of these headlines, and also I will avoid you looking too closely at my face for the next 10 minutes. But the conclusion of the inquiry was that Canada committed a genocide against Indigenous peoples. Now, this particular conclusion had a huge impact across the country, and as you can see from the news coverage around the world. The goal of my paper is to address the report's legal analysis on the issue of genocide and explore as well issues that which might arise regarding individual responsibility. And I propose to do this in three steps. So first by way of introduction, I'll just provide some context on the National Inquiry. Second, I'll address the report's legal conclusion regarding state responsibility. And in the last part, I'll explore some of the ramifications with regard to individual responsibility. So let me start with a little bit of context regarding the National Inquiry. So again, a very simple slide to keep your attention. It was commissioned by the Canadian government in 2016, and the initiative was a response to mounting public pressure from civil society and Indigenous organization. Now in the Canadian context, a National Inquiry is a serious exercise. It's established by government pursuant to an act of the Federal Inquiries Act, and it's given a mandate and resources to fulfill that mandate. And in this particular setting, the mandate was to examine and report on the systemic causes behind the violence that Indigenous women and girls experience in Canada. Now the work of the National Inquiry lasted around three years, and during that time they heard from multiple witnesses and ultimately published their report and their final report, I should say, in June 2019. So just a little bit less than a year ago. The final report is massive. It's around 1200 pages and contains many important recommendations. And I want to pause here to underline this important work. The testimonies and the factual conclusions really highlight alarming levels of violence and socioeconomic injustice faced by Indigenous women in Canada. And so my discussion of the legal issue should not distract from these very important conclusions. Having said that, from an international law perspective, the report is really noteworthy for its conclusion that Canada is internationally responsible for perpetrating a genocide. This is not a historical conclusion. The report states that this genocide is ongoing. The Commissioner's decision to ground their finding in an international law framework really sets it apart from other public inquiries that were held in Canada before. There had been other instances where the qualification of cultural genocide had been used, but it was used as a sociological term instead of a legalistic concept. So the National Inquiry went one step further by providing a legal analysis to justify the label of genocide. And that conclusion has naturally generated intense public debate and deserves careful scrutiny, which is what I propose to do. So let me move to the crunch of the analysis. How did they come to this conclusion? And given the time concern, I'll provide only a very brief online, but the report is very easily accessible online if you're interested by the issue. The report makes the case for the recognition of a colonial genocide, which is a particular form of genocide capable of falling within the definition of the genocide convention. In the words of the report, colonial genocide is slow-moving process. The colonial intent to destroy indigenous people has taken place insidiously and over centuries. So it's structural, systemic, and carries on over multiple administration and political leadership. So it's different from the regular paradigm where it's quite limited in scope and where it has massive killings in a limited amount of time. Now to transpose this in technical terms, the report relies on article 15 of the ILC articles on state responsibility and frames the Canadian Genocide as a composite act, which means that it's composed of numerous distinct acts and emissions which in aggregate violate the international prohibition on genocide. Actually, genocide is always qualified as a composite act, but this one simply stretches over a longer period, so it spans centuries. The report then proceeds to examine both the material elements and the specific contents of the actus reis and the mens reis. Now, on the difficult issue related to the exact scope of the mens reis, the report concludes in favor of a more inclusive interpretation that includes the intent to destroy the group as a social unit. So it goes beyond the traditional conception of genocidal intent, which is usually restricted to physical or biological destruction of the group. And it supports this conclusion in part by citing a trend of cases that emanate from the German domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights. But this first conclusion is quite controversial, given that it contradicts authorities which are simply ignored by the report, including most notably the ICJ judgment in Croatia, which explicitly rejected the interpretation now endorsed in the report. So the ICJ in that case concluded that the genocide convention was limited to physical and biological destruction, and this is simply not mentioned in the report. Leaving aside this issue, the report moves on to a factual analysis. So it cites many historical events to demonstrate what it calls a manifest pattern of similar conduct, reflecting the intention to destroy indigenous peoples. Now, to illustrate this pattern, the emphasis is on notorious atrocities committed in the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s, such as, and this is why I have included the photos, the distribution of blankets infested with smallpox, the legal proclamation offering scalping bounties for a number of murder of Mi'kmaq peoples and atrocities inflicted by in government sanctioned residential schools. And the report finds that many of these appalling policies aimed at destructing indigenous people continue today, albeit in different guides, such as the failure to provide essential services in some communities. But for the report, this demonstrates a pattern attributable to present day Canadian state. Now, even from this very brief summary, it might be immediately apparent that the report's analysis is deficient with regard to a very important aspect. It completely avoids dealing with the question of inter-temporality. As stated in Article 13 of the Articles on State Responsibility, only actions or emissions occurring after the prohibition on genocide came into existence will be internationally wrongful. The report states that colonial genocide has taken place over centuries, but it avoids dealing with the fundamental question of when was the crime genocide recognized under international law. Raphael Lemkin also in the slide here coined the term genocide in 1944 and most scholar would agree that would associate the crystallization of the prohibition on genocide in the period between 1945 and 48. This is not to say that actions prior to these dates are not relevant. For example, they may still be used to provide evidence of intent and this is something acknowledged in the ILC Commentaries to Article 15. But this still would raise another problem of determining whose intent exactly are we talking about because for much of the period discussed, Canada was under a British colonial rule and was not a state capable of incurring international responsibility or perhaps generating intent. But in any case, even if we're using colonial events to prove intent, it would still require a careful and separate analysis to demonstrate that sufficient acts and emissions amounting to genocide occurred after 1945. And the report makes a general reference, as I mentioned, to practice that is still ongoing in other forms, but unfortunately there's absolutely no effort to focus on the practice after 45 to see if it reaches the threshold of genocide. And it's hard to dismiss these temporal issues as trivial or secondary. And as a basis for comparison, it's worth pointing out the precedent of the Australian Human Rights Commission. In 1997 it also famously concluded that the forcible removal of aboriginal children was genocidal. And to reach that conclusion, the report of the Commission at the time addressed the temporal element and concluded that the practice of forcible removal continued for almost 25 years after 1945, which it determined was the relevant date. Now these are not the only problems with the analysis, but in line of the remaining time I moved to my final point, which is the relationship with individual responsibility. This last aspect raises practical difficulties related to the theme of the panel, which is the relationship between both types of responsibility. So setting aside the problem that I mentioned earlier, the report is notable for its lack of engagement with the issue of the individual responsibility entailed by its finding of genocide. To be sure, the National Inquiry explains that it made the deliberate choice of focusing solely on state responsibility, and that in itself is fine, but the problem becomes apparent when the report addresses the issue of reparation. So it concludes that Canada has a general obligation of reparation and it applies principles from the law of state responsibility. So obligation of cessation, continued performance, duty to redress harm by way of restitution, compensation, and satisfaction. Now as part of the obligation of reparation, the National Inquiry makes the case that Canada is bound under international law to implement 231 calls for justice. In a regular inquiry, these calls for justice would be named recommendation. Essentially they recommend concrete actions to remove systemic causes of violence against indigenous women, mostly socioeconomic measures. But what is particularly noteworthy is that the National Inquiry does not call for the prosecution of individuals responsible for committing genocide. None of the calls for justice deal with this issue. But prosecution would be an integral part of Canada's international responsibility. Here the relevant primary rule embodied in the genocide convention provides that persons committing genocide shall be tried and punished irrespective of their official status. As following the National Inquiry's reasoning, if Canada is responsible for an ongoing genocide, then necessarily it entails an obligation to prosecute those responsible. The socioeconomic measures mandated by the National Inquiry might be very beneficial to indigenous communities, but in international law they cannot serve as a substitute for the enforcement of the convention which mandates criminal prosecution. Accepting without reservation the report's conclusion, it would most likely lead to the prosecution against many senior government officials and potentially the prime minister by application of the Doctrine of Security Responsibility. This type of prosecution would normally form part of the reparation and the obligation of continued performance. Now it might very well be that politically the National Inquiry was not ready to go this far, but it is in practice the logical consequence to be drawn from the report. By ignoring this fundamental enforcement issue, the National Inquiry is essentially cherry picking legal consequences. And in my mind this certainly casts doubts on the seriousness of its commitment to an international law approach. Overall and to conclude, in a lot of these issues discussed, the decision to ground the report in an international law framework is problematic on several levels and in my mind should have been avoided. The term genocide or cultural genocide could still have been used as a sociological phenomenon to describe what is justifiable criticism of Canadian policies with indigenous people. To go further and ground the concept in a legal analysis was, in my opinion, not a wise choice and it does not withstand scrutiny. Thank you very much.