Well, that was fast.

By Colby Cosh - Friday, April 30, 2010 - 43 Comments

I think those who expected the government to answer the Speaker’s ruling on the detainee documents with a Nixonian jihad must now start recalibrating. Can I appeal to fellow chattering-class types to start getting used to the way apparent reversals for the Conservatives turn very, very quickly into opportunities to divide and confuse the Opposition?

The ministry—whether you happen to think the Speaker chastised it with whips this week or felt it to be more of a scorpion-y kinda thing—doesn’t have to come up with a disclosure solution that satisfies every single parliamentarian on the Hill. To obtain majority support, the government only has to come up with something that the Liberals, en bloc, can agree to. The Conservatives’ bargaining chip is this: they can approach Michael Ignatieff and say “OK, we can get together on this and help you look like a responsible statesman; or, you can insist on the right of Gilles Duceppe and Libby Davies to be personally involved in the most intricate details of our military affairs, and we can go to the country and have an election on that basis.” Anyone who denies that this is a very strong poker hand hasn’t read the cards correctly. (I guess I understand the potential confusion: it might be easy to confuse the rights of Parliament with the personal political entitlement of Ms. Davies if you happen to think that she would, in fact, make a first-rate defence minister.)

Ignatieff is inevitably going to be criticized for “weakness” when the eventual modus vivendi, one likely to be comfortable for the Conservatives and marginally tolerable for the Liberals, is arrived at. When it comes to disputes over parliamentary procedure, I’m afraid Mr. Ignatieff is no more or less weak than his party’s standing in the House of Commons.

Where the talk of torture could lead

By John Geddes - Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 1:30 PM - 16 Comments

Could Canadians actually be charged with war crimes?

Richard Colvin had barely ﬁnished delivering his incendiary testimony about torture in Afghanistan to a House committee last week before ﬁerce debate broke out. For politicians and the public, the issue was whether the diplomat is a courageous whistleblower or an unreliable rogue. But among international law experts, the argument is about the ultimate outcome if his allegations—about federal ofﬁcials ignoring clear warnings that detainees transferred by Canadian troops to Afghan authorities were being tortured—hold up. Is there a serious prospect of Canadian military or civilian officials being investigated and even charged as war criminals?

A few outspoken law professors quickly concluded that Colvin’s revelations formed a solid basis for a war crimes case. But others told Maclean’s that dramatic outcome is extremely unlikely. The experts are sparring over a relatively untested federal law. International law on war crimes went through a period of rapid reform in the 1990s, largely in the wake of atrocities committed in the violent breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Prompted by the creation of the International Criminal Court, Canada passed a new Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act on Oct. 23, 2000. The ﬁrst person convicted under the act, Désiré Munyaneza, a Rwandan who led a band of murderers in that country’s 1994 genocide, was sentenced last month in a Montreal court to life in prison.

The possibility that the same law meant to bring the likes of Munyaneza to justice could be applied to Canadians involved in Afghan detainee transfers is sobering. Recognizing that even raising the possibility is controversial, some lawyers who have been hashing over the issue in private declined to be interviewed on the record. Yet several prominent academic experts said it could and should happen. “We must hope that the will to investigate and prosecute is present,” said Michael Byers, a University of British Columbia law professor and former federal NDP candidate in Vancouver. Continue…