'No reason to be any less vocal'
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - 6 Comments
Adam Radwanski considers the curious case of Abousfian Abdelrazik.
Either we support civil liberties, or we don’t. It would be nice if we only had to defend people we already knew to be perfectly upstanding, law-abiding citizens, but those aren’t the people whose civil liberties need to be defended. It’s in the treatment of people about whom there are lingering doubts that a nation’s real respect for rights is tested.
I’d say that actively blocking a Canadian citizen from re-entering the country, when there are no charges against him and he’s been publicly cleared by both CSIS and the RCMP, would suggest we’re failing that test mightily. Fear of backing up a “bad guy,” the words security officials used to whisper about Arar, shouldn’t lead the rest of us to stand meekly by.
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Canada, so totally back
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 25, 2008 at 1:35 PM - 1 Comment
Three of a kind.
Paul Koring in the Globe. “Although ministers told the House of Commons last spring that Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen, had received full consular assistance, the documents show a senior Foreign Affairs official explicitly ordered Canadian diplomats in Khartoum to stay away from the interrogation by U.S. agents.”
Wesley Wark in the Citizen. “The Conservative policy has hit a realpolitik wall. The United States has a new president-elect, Barack Obama, who has committed his government, repeatedly, to the closing down of Guantanamo Bay. Even if this promise is delayed in its execution, the trial of Omar Khadr will never lead anywhere; its wheels will come off, just as so many others are doing at Guantanamo Bay.”
Michael Petrou in Maclean’s. “Vafaseresht, a man who surely would have been a valuable witness and source of information for any legal case Canada might compile against Saeed Mortazavi, hasn’t been in touch with any Canadian diplomats or government officials since. It’s a stunning oversight, if one assumes that Stephen Harper was sincere when he said that Canada had not “dropped” the matter of Kazemi’s murder. But the available evidence suggests that Canada still isn’t serious about building a case against Mortazavi.”
