Kerry Pither

Special to the Ottawa Citizen, June 26, 2009

It’s official. As long as the U.S. doesn’t interfere, Abousfian Abdelrazik will finally return home on Saturday, the fifth Canadian to come home with questions about Canadian complicity in his torture.

Has anything changed since the four with stories so similar to his – Maher Arar, Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin – came home and demanded answers about Canada’s role in their torture?

For starters, we aren’t as easily convinced when fellow citizens are labeled as terror suspects. An overwhelming number of Canadians from all walks of life – apparently more skeptical of the security apparatus and the government than Abdelrazik – were willing to risk criminal charges by contributing to his airline ticket home.

That’s encouraging, and not surprising, given all we’ve learned from the Arar and Iacobucci Inquiries about the lack of evidence behind the allegations leveled against the others.

The media is more skeptical too. Even before Arar, El Maati and Almalki were released, the onus was on them to somehow disprove allegations being hurled at them in the media by nameless, faceless officials hoping to distract attention from their own shameful behaviour. Thanks to findings at the Arar Inquiry, and the benefit of hindsight, very few journalists are still willing to publish terrorism allegations from officials insisting on anonymity. That’s encouraging too.

We’ve also seen a shift in the courts, aptly demonstrated by the Federal Court ruling forcing Canada to bring Abdelrazik home.

But have the Canadian government and its agencies changed?

There, the news isn’t as good.

By waiting until a Federal Court forced it to bring Abdelrazik home, the government demonstrated it has learned precious little. And CSIS and the RCMP have yet to express any remorse for their now well-documented contribution the torture of El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin. So despite evidence that CSIS requested Abdelrazik’s detention, it’s unlikely he’ll be getting an apology any time soon.

So where can he turn for answers and accountability?

When Arar returned home almost six years ago, Shirley Heafey, then chair of the RCMP’s Public Complaints Commission, had publicly revealed that the force was refusing to cooperate with her investigations. Even if she had won new powers, her investigation would have been restricted to the RCMP, and Arar would have had to ask for separate investigations into the roles of CSIS, the CBSA, DFAIT and other agencies.

That’s why he called for a public inquiry – one that could subpoena witnesses and evidence from all the Canadian agencies implicated in his case.

Arar won that inquiry, and through it we all won many answers and important recommendations. Recognizing there was nowhere for El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin to turn for answers either, the Arar Inquiry made a recommendation leading to the creation of a second inquiry to examine their cases. And to address the long term, the Arar Inquiry called for the creation of a review mechanism with powers much like its own.

That recommendation, made more than two and a half years ago, has been fiercely resisted by CSIS and the RCMP, and dutifully ignored by the government.

Not that things have changed. Just weeks ago, the current chair of the RCMP Public Complaints Commission announced that he still lacks the power to investigate the force’s national security work. And SIRC has emphasized that its investigation into Abdelrazik’s case will be limited to CSIS involvement, not other agencies involved.

The government, apparently lacking the courage to stand up to CSIS and the RCMP, says that before it can implement that robust, independent and integrated review mechanism, we need to wait until the Air India Inquiry releases its report.

So Abdelrazik comes home to the same dilemma Arar faced six years ago. How will he, and we, get to the bottom of who did what in his case? Must he fight for an inquiry too? If he somehow manages to win one, will that be used as another excuse to stall implementation of a long term solution? And in the meantime, how are we to have any confidence in the agencies that are supposed to make us feel safer?

If the government won’t stand up to CSIS and the RCMP, we must. Canadians must insist on implementation of the long term, efficient and effective checks and balances so essential to delivering the accountability our democracy demands.

The Federal Court of Canada has ruled that Abousfian Abdelrazik’s right to return to Canada, under subsection 6(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, has been violated by the government. “The Court therefore allows the application and orders the Canadian government to take action to return the applicant to Canada.” See the full decision here.

The government is blocking Abousfian Abdelrazik’s return to Canada for a very simple reason: to shield Canadian officials and agencies for their complicity in his detention and torture. I’ve written an op-ed on how recent history is repeating itself in the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik, and about the startling parallels between his case and those of Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki, Maher Arar and Muayyed Nureddin. Check it out below.

Why Canada doesn’t want Abousfian Abdelrazik to come home
By Kerry Pither
Ottawa Citizen, May 13, 2009

Why won’t the Harper government let Abousfian Abdelrazik come home?

Recent history shows it is likely about shielding Canadian agencies from accountability for their role in his detention and torture.

Indeed, there’s frighteningly very little that is unprecedented about the federal government’s handling of Mr. Abdelrazik’s case now, or in the past.

Two federal commissions of inquiry—the Arar Inquiry and the Iacobucci Inquiry—have documented Canada’s role in the overseas detention and torture of four other Canadian Muslim men.

Maher Arar was the first to come home and talk about how he was detained in the US because of erroneous allegations from Canada, then shipped to Syria where he was tortured and held in deplorable conditions for a year.

And while the Inquiry into his case was ongoing, we learned of three other cases.

Ahmad El Maati was detained in November 2001 when he traveled to Syria to celebrate his wedding. Canada had shared erroneous allegations about him with the Syrian Military Intelligence – allegations that would be the subject of brutal interrogations under torture for two months in Syria, then two years in Egypt. In Syria, El Maati was whipped with cables. In Egypt, he was subjected to electric shock.

Abdullah Almalki was detained in May 2002 when he travelled to Syria to visit his ailing grandmother. Canadian officials sent questions for interrogators to ask Almalki too – along with a cover letter promising more information “depending on his willingness to answer.” Of course that shouldn’t have been in question given the reputation of interrogators there. Mr. Almalki was whipped repeatedly on the soles of his feet and held in a three by six by seven foot dark, underground cell for seventeen months before being moved then released after 22 months in detention.

Muayyed Nureddin was detained by the Syrians in December 2003 after visiting his family in Iraq—again, because of Canadian allegations that would be the subject of interrogations under torture. He was released after 33 days in detention.

Just as inquiries into those other cases determined that allegations against them were variously erroneous, inaccurate, unqualified, inflammatory, or without evidentiary basis, Mr. Abdelrazik has been cleared of terrorist ties by CSIS and the RCMP.

And just as Canada was implicated in the detention of the others, government documents say Sudanese officials detained Mr. Abdelrazik at Canada’s request.

In the other cases, CSIS was unsuccessful in repeated bids to interrogate them in overseas detention centres. The agency was successful in Mr. Abdelrazik’s case – they interrogated him in Sudanese custody, and just like in the other cases, didn’t inform his family, or Canada’s consular officials, of his whereabouts.

El Maati, Almalki, Arar and Nureddin were all eventually cleared by their overseas jailers and released. Similarly, Mr. Abdelrazik was released after a total of 19 months in detention because Sudanese officials said they could no longer hold an innocent at another country’s behest.
But the parallels don’t stop there.

Despite the well-documented records of torture in Syria and Egypt, the federal government tried to cast doubt on Arar, El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin’s claims of torture, and was proven wrong at the inquiries.
Mr. Abdelrazik says he was tortured in detention, and has the scars to prove it, but astonishingly, federal government lawyers have tried to assert that his wounds were self-inflicted.

And just as is happening now to Mr. Abdelrazik, Arar, El Maati, Almalki and their families had to fight repeated attempts by Canadian agencies to block their release and return home.

In October 2003, just ten days after Maher Arar’s release and return to Canada, a CSIS official speculated in a memo that it was “unlikely that, should Abdelrazik’s detention in Sudan become public knowledge, there would be the same sort of outcry that surrounded Maher Arar’s arrest and deportation from the USA.” 

He was right, at least in the short term. But here’s where history repeats itself yet again – the more the Harper government does to block Abdelrazik’s return, the more the media, and the public, are paying attention.

And the more inevitable it becomes that Mr. Abdelrazik will come home, and will, eventually, get answers.

While the public waits for answers about Canadian complicity in the overseas detention and torture of El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin, startling evidence is emerging about Canadian complicity in the detention and torture of yet another Canadian, Abousfian Abdelrazik, in Sudan.

It should come as no surprise that the Canadian government is blocking his return to Canada.

According to just-released testimony by Sean Robertson, a senior foreign affairs official, the Harper government was presented with evidence that Abdelrazik was tortured in Sudanese prisons after being imprisoned there at Canada’s request.

Robertson testified that when Deepak Obhrai, Canada’s junior foreign minister, travelled to Khartoum to question Abdelrazik last March, Abdelrazik said he’d been whipped with cables and lifted his shirt to show the scars still evident more than two years later.  

Predictably, Obhrai isn’t taking calls from the Globe and Mail’s Paul Koring, who wanted to know what, if anything, Obhrai and other government officials, did about it.

In a story in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, Koring writes: