Fast-Tracking Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement a Betrayal of Commitments  http://www.canadianlabour.ca/news-room/statements/fast-tracking-canada-colombia-free-trade-agreement-betrayal-commitments

The Colombian government has already been preparing its own reports on labour rights violations for the International Labour Organization for decades, and yet the murder of trade unionists persists. 45 trade unionists were killed in 2009, maintaining Colombia’s dubious record of being the most dangerous country to be a trade union leader.

The Colombian government is deeply mired in human rights violations. Asking a country which allows its security forces to engage in the murder of its own citizens, as documented by the UN High Commission for Human Rights in a November 2008 report, to assess its own human rights record is a mockery. This is no where near the independent human rights assessment that unions and human rights organizations, and indeed Canada’s parliamentarians called for in 2008.