by unknown author
Source: The Globe and Mail
URL: [link]
Date: July 23, 2010


Federal Court sides with man accused of terrorist links, citing ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe information was obtained through torture

Canada's national security agency does not have an “effective mechanism” for ensuring it does not rely on evidence obtained by torture, the Federal Court has found.

The court sided with a man accused of terrorist links, who Ottawa is trying to deport, in finding there are “reasonable grounds” to believe some of the information against him was obtained through torture and is therefore inadmissible.

Mohamed Mahjoub was arrested in 2000 and held on a national security certificate, accused of links to an Egyptian Islamic terrorist organization.

In a motion in his case, he argued that the policy of CSIS to “not knowingly” rely on evidence from torture doesn't actually prevent it. The court agreed.

“In my view, these policies and practices do not provide for an effective mechanism to ensure that such information is actually excluded from the evidence,” writes Justice Edmond Blanchard.

“It is also clear from the record that the service does not have the means to independently investigate whether the information is obtained from torture.”

The court has ordered the government to review its information against Mr. Mahjoub and identify sources.

Mr. Mahjoub, married with three children, was initially released from prison under conditions amounting to house arrest in 2007. However, he asked to return to prison after the family supervising him said they could no longer deal with the onerous conditions imposed by the court.

He was ordered freed again in November 2009 after a months-long hunger strike — during which he lost more than 22 kilograms — to protest the conditions in the prison. Mr. Mahjoub was allowed to leave the holding centre in eastern Ontario as long as he wears a monitoring bracelet and honours other restrictions.

National security certificates are rarely used immigration tools for deporting non-Canadians considered a risk to the country.

© Copyright 2010 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

by Amy Goodman
Source: Democracy Now
URL: [link]
Date: July 22, 2010

Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Missing After Forced Repatriation

An Algerian man who was held at Guantánamo has gone missing after the United States sent him back to Algeria against his will. Abdul Aziz Naji had been held at Guantánamo for eight years but did not want to return to Algeria because he feared persecution from the Algerian government and Islamist militants. The Center for Constitutional Rights criticized the forced repatriation of Naji, saying it was done in violation of the UN Convention Against Torture and other international laws.
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For more news and commentary about Abdul Aziz Naji see www.wikio.co.uk/news/Abdul+Aziz

There is an interesting interview at Cageprisoners.com with a British citizen known only as "BF" who is a control order detainee in the UK.

Detainee BF is among the latest British citizens to have been placed under a control order. He talks to Cageprisoners exclusively about the impact the order has had on his life and why it continues to be enforced.

Read MORE.

by Cristin Schmitz
Source: The Lawyers Weekly
URL: [link]
Date: July 16, 2010


Are immigration security certificates dead?

Following a spate of court defeats since last fall, the government has been quietly re-examining whether security certificates are still viable in terrorism-related cases which raise the prospect of indefinitely detaining the named person, or deporting them back to countries where they may be tortured.

Special advocates and other experts on national security law told The Lawyers Weekly the Harper government may be poised to abandon security certificates in favour of an administrative model for ejecting permanent residents and foreign nationals it deems to be a danger to Canada.

“The feeling I get, and nothing has been said to me [by officials],…is that the government has found the security certificate cases too complicated, too long, and expensive, and will attempt to achieve whatever objective they have concerning permanent residents or foreign nationals by some other procedure — which could be before the immigration division of the Immigration and Refugee Board, or some other kind of administrative body or person,” says Paul Cavalluzzo of Toronto’s Cavalluzzo Hayes.

Paul Copeland of Toronto’s Copeland Duncan notes “the general opinion among all of the special advocates who have worked on the [five al-Qaeda-related security certificate] cases is that [the government] won’t do another.”

However Cavalluzzo, who with Copeland is special advocate (SA) for security certificate detainee Mohamed Harkat, says he doubts that the government can come up with an acceptable, in camera administrative procedure for handling immigration cases that involve national security claims and secret evidence, particularly if the cases are to be presided over by a non-lawyer decision-maker.

[ Read the rest ... ]

by Adam Wagner
Source: UK Human Rights Blog
URL: [link]
Date: June 16, 2010


The Supreme Court have given the latest judgment on the controversial control order scheme, and in this case have allowed the appeal of a man suspected of terrorism on the grounds that confinement to a flat 150 miles away from his family amounted to a breach of his human rights.

The Appellant was an Ethiopian national who was the subject of a control order. This confined him to a flat for 16 hours a day in a Midlands town 150 miles away from his family in London.

The Supreme Court unanimously allowed the appeal, set aside the decision of the Court of Appeal and restored the High Court’s order. Lord Brown gave the leading judgment. Lord Rodger and Sir John Dyson SCJ delivered concurring judgments. The press summary of the judgment can be read HERE and the summary below is drawn from it.

Restriction on right to family life tipped the balance

Lord Brown confirmed that conditions which are proportionate restrictions upon Article 8 rights to respect for private and family life can ‘tip the balance’ in relation to Article 5 (which guarantees the right to liberty and security), ie whether they can be taken into account in holding that a control order is a deprivation of liberty when, absent those restrictions, it would not have been held to be such.

In respect of whether the control order amounted a breach of AP’s Article 5 rights to liberty and security, Lord Brown was of the view that the Secretary of State was wrong to contend that, in assessing the weight to be given to the restrictive effects of a condition such as that imposed on AP here to reside in the Midlands, the judge should ignore everything that depends on the individual circumstances of the family.


[ Read the rest ... ]

by The Canadian Press
Source: The Globe and Mail
URL: [link]
Date: July 6, 2010


The courts have once again concluded that the Harper government has not done enough to protect the constitutional rights of Toronto-born terrorism suspect Omar Khadr.

The Federal Court of Canada ruled on Monday that the government has seven days to come up with a list of remedies to its breach of Mr. Khadr’s constitutional rights.

The Canadian citizen – the last Western national held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – is entitled to “procedural fairness and natural justice.”

Mr. Justice Russel Zinn ruled in January that Ottawa had not met the standard set by the Supreme Court of Canada when it ordered the federal government to right the wrongs it had brought on the 23-year-old accused of killing a U.S. soldier in 2002 in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon has charged that Mr. Khadr, then 15, tossed a grenade that killed the soldier during a firefight between Taliban supporters and U.S. forces.

[ Read the rest ... ]

by Lisa Hajjar
Source: Middle East Report Online
URL: [link]
Date: June 24, 2010


On June 14, the [United States] Supreme Court buried the prospect of justice for Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian origin who was “extraordinarily rendered” by the United States (via Jordan) to Syria in 2002. Arar was suing the US officials who authorized his secret transfer, without charge, to a country infamous for torture. With the justices’ 22-word statement, the case of Arar v. Ashcroft exited the American legal system and entered the annals of American legal history under the category “grave injustice.” Alphabetically, Arar precedes Dred Scott v. Sanford, which upheld slavery, and Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the internment of Japanese Americans. In this case, however, the grave is literal: Arar spent ten months of his year in Syrian custody confined in what he describes as “an underground grave.”

Although Arar v. Ashcroft was a product of the Bush administration’s torture policy, the Supreme Court’s rejection of Arar’s petition was a victory for the Obama administration, which had sought that outcome. In the government’s motion, following the obligatory pieties that the US does not countenance torture, Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal argued that adjudication would require the courts to “review sensitive intergovernmental communications, second-guess whether Syrian officials were credible enough for United States officials to rely on them…as well as the motives and sincerity of United States officials who concluded that petitioner could be removed to Syria.”[1] The move to quash this suit is the latest evidence that when President Barack Obama says he wants to “look forward, not backward,” he means that he wants to keep embarrassing information about serious official misconduct in the “war on terror” and criminal disregard for the law out of the public domain. The courts have been receptive to the Bush-Obama arguments that such cases would damage national security and foreign relations, with majorities contending that, no matter how egregious the allegations or how abundant the evidence of torture, they are non-justiciable.

There is a harmony among the three branches of government in the shared and cooperative unwillingness to hold US officials accountable for their roles in perpetrating or abetting grave breaches of law. As long as the accused are Americans, the “new normal” is impunity for torture. Ironically, however, US courts are still amenable to hearing and deciding cases against officials who perpetrate or abet torture for foreign regimes, like Haiti’s Emmanuel Constant and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, who were recently and successfully sued by their victims in America.

Transit Into Darkness

Arar’s ordeal began on September 26, 2002, while he was changing planes at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on his way back to Canada from Tunisia, where he had been visiting his wife’s family. Arar traveled frequently to the US and in April 2002 had renewed his American work permit because he did consulting for a Boston-based company. On this occasion, he was detained, then moved to a high-security section of the airport and held incommunicado. He was questioned about al-Qaeda and about his relations with other Canadian Muslims, as well as his views on Iraq and Palestine. At one point, he was shown a copy of his 1997 rental agreement that listed Abdullah Almalki, another Syrian Canadian engineer, as an emergency reference.[2]

[ Read the rest ... ]

by Catherine Porter
Source: The Toronto Star
URL: [link]
Date: June 26, 2010


They call it the Miami Model.

But it could be called the Genoa model, the Pittsburgh model and, after this weekend, the Toronto model.

It refers to police tactics used in Miami seven years ago, during the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit, and, more importantly, the protests erupting on the streets outside.

Manny Diaz, Miami’s then-mayor, called the police methods exemplary — a model to be followed by homeland security when confronting protesters.

Human rights groups including Amnesty International called it a model of police brutality and intimidation.

Protesters were beaten with tear gas, sticks, rubber bullets . . . You can watch police stun cowering protesters with Tasers on YouTube. Last year, the city agreed it had trampled citizens’ right to free speech by forcing marchers back from planned protests and settled out of court with Amnesty International.

What is the Miami Model?

I called Naomi Archer to find out. She is an indigenous rights worker from North Carolina who happened to be giving a lecture on the Miami Model yesterday at the U.S. Social Forum — the G20 for community activists.

Archer, who was in Miami as a liaison between protesters and police, has a 40-box checklist to identify the Model. Here are the main themes.

Information warfare. This starts weeks before the event. Protesters are criminalized and dehumanized, and described as dangerous “anarchists” and “terrorists” the city needs to defend against.

[ Read the rest ... ]

by Andrew Duffy
Source: The Ottawa Citizen // The Vancouver Sun
URL: [link]
Date: June 25, 2010

OTTAWA — The federal government, in contesting a $180-million lawsuit by three Muslim-Canadians, is refusing to accept the factual findings of its own judicial inquiry into the detention and torture of the men in Syria and Egypt.

It means Canadian taxpayers could end up paying millions more to re-establish the same facts set out by the $6-million inquiry headed by former Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci.

"They (the government) will spend as much again re-litigating this, if not more," said lawyer Philip Tunley, who represents Egyptian-born Ahmad El-Maati.

"The cost will be enormous," he said.

In his October 2008 report, Iacobucci found that El-Maati, a former Toronto truck driver, Abdullah Almalki, an Ottawa electrical engineer, and Muayyed Nureddin, a Toronto car exporter, were detained and tortured in the Middle East due in part to the actions of Canadian officials.

Iacobucci detailed a series of investigatory and diplomatic failures in the cases, which unfolded between 2001 and 2004.

Iacobucci, however, did not single out any individual for blame. Instead, he said the officials involved conscientiously carried out their duties at a time — post 9/11 — when there was "intense pressure" on intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

[ Read the rest ... ]

by Kathy Kelly of Witness Against Torture
Source: Counterpunch.org
URL: [link]
Date: June 23, 2010


A protest against state-sanctioned torture. It was held on the steps of Capitol Hill, Washington DC on January 21, 2010. Photo by Bill Ofenloch. CLICK TO ENLARGE.

An old cliché says that anyone who has herself for a lawyer has a fool for a client. Nevertheless, going to trial in Washington, D.C., this past June 14, I and twenty-three other defendants prepared a pro se defense. Acting as our own lawyers in court, we aimed to defend a population that finds little voice in our society at all, and to bring a sort of prosecution against their persecutors.

Months earlier, on January 21, we had held a memorial vigil for three innocent Guantanamo prisoners, recently revealed to have been in all probability tortured to death by our government with what would turn out to be utter impunity – and because we had wished the culpable parties to take notice, we’d staged a vigil where they worked, specifically on the Capitol Steps and in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol Building. We had been charged with causing a “breach of the peace,” a technical legal term for a situation that might risk inciting people to violence. In abetting Administration use of torture, Congress had been inciting others to horrendous violence, and we’d been protesting perhaps one of the gravest imaginable breaches of the peace. Now we were making our small attempt to take these crimes to court, in the course of defending ourselves against what we felt to be a misdirected charge.

At the time of our arrest, we were on the final day of a 12-day fast organized by Witness Against Torture, aiming to help end the U.S. practice of torturing prisoners. Calling for the long-promised and long-delayed closure of Guantanamo, release of all detainees held without charge there, and an actual end to U.S. usage of torture, we had considered it our duty under international law, and our right under the Constitution, to assemble peaceably at the seat of government for redress of extremely serious grievances.

[ Read the rest ... ]