RSS FeedReview of Dennis Edney’s Lecture, “The Rule of Law in an Age of Terror”
“Human rights have a dysfunctional relationship with justice. The language is certainly beautiful, but it’s all dressed up with nowhere to go,” charged Dennis Edney in a scathing lecture at the Faculty of Law at UBC on September 15.
Edney worked from 2004 to 2011 on Omar Khadr’s defence against charges stemming from the July 2002 firefight death of a US soldier. Khadr, who is Canadian, was 15 at the time. American forces interrogated him for three months in the US-operated Bagram Theatre Detention Facility in Afghanistan, before transferring him to Guantanamo Bay, where he remains. In 2005, Khadr’s chief interrogator from Bagram, US Sergeant Joshua Claus, was found guilty of offences relating to the routine torture and homicide of Bagram prisoners. Claus received a five-month prison sentence. He testified at Khadr’s military trial in 2010.
In April 2009, the Federal Court ruled that Canada was complicit in the US’s torture of Khadr and ordered Ottawa to seek his repatriation. The Federal Court of Appeal concurred, but the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that though Canada was violating Khadr’s human rights, it was not obliged to seek his repatriation.
In October 2010, after insisting on his innocence for years, Khadr pled guilty in a military trial to terrorism-related offences, in exchange for a promise from Canada to repatriate him by October 2011 to serve the rest of his prison sentence in Canada. On September 20, the Conservatives tabled the controversial omnibus Bill C-10, which adds “additional criteria” to decisions about “whether or not to allow the transfer of a Canadian offender back to Canada to serve their sentence.”
Shortly after the trial, Edney declared that Khadr “would have confessed to anything, including the killing of John F. Kennedy, just to get out of this hellhole” and that if he had refused, Khadr would have been faced with “an unfair [military] trial based on evidence that would be inadmissible in a real court.” On Thursday, Edney said the detainees are entitled “to all kinds of international protections, but our governments are not asking for them. And by not asking, we become complicit.” There are nearly 800 prisoners in Guantanamo, but only 4 have been charged and given a trial. Detainees cannot see the evidence used against them.
In his lecture, Edney denounced the Canadian government for perpetuating a culture of fear in the camp’s defence. Edney stated that “since there has always historically been terrorism, and since there will always be terrorist threats, this war on terror – if allowed to be one – is unlike any other, because it is never-ending.” Thus, last decade has been marred by “habeas corpus being abandoned, secret courts being created to hear secret evidence, guilt inferred by association, torture and rendition nakedly justified.”
“I went into Guantanamo Bay as a lawyer and I came out as a broken father,” said Edney. “I never thought that in my lifetime I would go to such an evil place and see such evil being done.” Of the infamous cages, Edney said that “people go into those cages thinking they’re having a holiday in there.” He drew attention to Camps 5, 6, and 7. The first two are “designed for enhanced interrogation tactics: torture.” He said about Camp 7 that “We are not allowed to talk about it. We have prisoners in there who came from Europe, about a year and a half ago, and they’re going to be there forever, because there’s no one there to help.”
Edney discussed the 9/11 witch hunt, in which “the US government detained hundreds, if not thousands, of people of colour on the suspicion of terrorist activity, some of them up to a year, all without charges.” He continued that “almost none of those individuals were found to have been in any way connected with terrorism. Yet many continue to be held without being formally charged with any crime or immigration violation.” In this way Guantanamo “provides powerful evidence of how America and the West are making war on terror synonymous with the war on Islam. No white Anglo-Saxon goes to Guantanamo Bay. Any American picked up for terrorism offences gets due process in a federal court system in New York.”
One audience member suggested that the camp must serve some purpose, because otherwise US President Barrack Obama would have followed through on his promise to shut it down. Edney responded that the camp primarily functions as “an important propaganda tool.” He argued the Obama administration has in fact “systematised” the culture of torture normalised under George W. Bush, for instance by disallowing victims of extraordinary rendition from suing Washington for torture suffered overseas.
Edney was also critical of “lazy” media and academics who have persisted in “slotting events into a sort of juicy clash of civilisations story,” as exemplified by mainstream media coverage of Anders Behring Breivik’s terrorist attack in Oslo. He killed 69 people in July, avowedly to protect Europe from Muslims. Edney said, “as soon as the bomb went off, media organisations began reporting on jihadist organisations.” This, he said, “fit perfectly the story we have all been telling each other since 9/11 that who else, who else could be so hateful, so crazy, so disrespectful of life but Muslims.” He pointed out that though Breivik is a white Norwegian Christian, “we don’t hold Christians or conservatives or liberals responsible for Brievek’s despicable acts.”
He said that “since September 11 2001, race, ethnicity, and religion have become proxies for suspected terrorist activity, which in turn has become a pretext for the application of Canadian immigration laws in an unequal manner towards Arabs, South Asians, Muslims and so on.” In an apparent nod to Bill C-4, the anti-refugee bill that the Conservatives tabled on Tuesday despite widespread condemnation, he noted that “we just have to listen to media descriptions coming out of Ottawa when we talk about refugees today. We call them queue jumpers and potential terrorists.”
Edney also expressed anger at the public’s willingness to be lulled into complicity. He described the transfer of the prisoners to Guantanamo “in rows in aircraft, hooded and shackled for transportation across the Atlantic” as similar to eighteenth century slave ships. He maintained that for “the watching world, no knowledge of international humanitarian conventions is needed to understand that what was being witnessed was simply unlawful.” He blamed public apathy for “allowing anti-Muslim sentiment to become part of our mainstream conversations.” He said, “I say to you we cannot tackle manifestations of intolerance, unless we learn and understand how the constant use of fear pervades our everyday life, and how that fear is being used to influence how you and I think and how you and I act. It’s that same manipulation of fear that has allowed military escapades into countries beyond those who bombed the twin towers. It is that same message that has been exploited by participating countries to reduce civil liberties and infringe upon human rights by allowing such places as Guantanamo Bay to exist.”
The need for action had been a prevailing theme throughout the lecture. Edney returned to it at his lecture’s close: “Not only does it [Guantanamo] continue to exist, they continue building it. Guantanamo is going to be there for a long, long time, unless you do something. Unless you really do something about it.” He concluded that “the only crime equal to wilful inhumanity is the crime of indifference, the crime of silence, the crime of forgetting.”
In that vein, we cannot afford to forget that Guantanamo Bay’s precedents in the West include Canada’s own internment camps, built in BC expressly to detain Japanese-Canadians during WWII. Similarly, Bill C-4’s predecessors include the Chinese head-tax policy.
Responses to Prime Minister of Canada v. Omar Khadr
The anticipated ruling by the SCC in Prime Minister of Canada v. Omar Khadr was released today, and already there is criticism of the decision that ruled that although Khadr’s s. 7 rights were violated, the court could not order the Prime Minister to seek his return.
One of Khadr’s lawyers, Nathan Whitling, said,
He has never had a whole lot of hope in terms of the Canadian government, in any event.
One of Khadr’s other counsel, Dennis Edney, stated,
I will say that the court has the belief that … the Canadian government has a moral conscience and will do the right thing. I will tell him, ‘And that’s what we have to pray and hope.’
Alex Neve of Amnesty International, an intervenor in the case, stated,
It is not open to the Canadian government to just yawn and not take that seriously now. There has to be an effective response that demonstrates that this government is prepared to stand up for rights of Canadians and is prepared to take seriously judgments of the Supreme Court of Canada, even if the court did not feel inclined to say specifically what the Canadian government has to do here.
In a decision with so much responsibility shifted to the political arena, it’s no surprise that politicians are weighing in as well. Michael Ignatieff, leader of the opposition, said of the government,
The only thing it can’t do is to do nothing because the court clearly said that the rights of a Canadian citizen have been violated.
But some of the strongest critiques have come from academia, specifically the The David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights at the University of Toronto.
In a press release sent to this site Diana Juricevic, Director of the International Human Rights Program at UofT Faculty of Law, stated,
We are very disappointed with the decision. Remedies have to be meaningful in order for Charter rights to be taken seriously. The Supreme Court of Canada has failed Khadr. They have left the decision on what the appropriate remedy is to the Canadian government, which breached Khadr’s fundamental human rights in the first place.
Cheryl Milne, Executive Director of the David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights, said,
One hopes that the strong pronouncement by the unanimous Court that Canada has violated Omar Khadr’s rights and that the impact of that violation continues unless the government acts, will carry sufficient weight with the Prime Minister to persuade him to do the morally and legally right thing– seek Omar’s repatriation.
And finally, Professor Audrey Macklin, who acted as co-counsel in the case, expressed her frustrations,
The Supreme Court of Canada has spoken clearly, definitively and unanimously on the past and ongoing present violation of Omar Khadr’s rights by the Canadian government. It has pointed to a request for repatriation as an appropriate remedy for the violation of those rights. It now falls to the Prime Minister to do what the Supreme Court of Canada encourages but does not force him to do. If the word of the Supreme Court of Canada that the government has violated Khadr’s Charter rights and should seek repatriation is not enough to motivate this government to act, then I am not sure what is enough to motivate this government to do the right thing.
Unique photos of Omar Khadr may be evidence of his innocence
Omar Khadr Omar Khadr ‘innocent’ in death of U.S. soldier
Michelle Shephard writes for the Toronto Star:
Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr was buried face down under rubble, blinded by shrapnel and crippled, at the time the Pentagon alleges he threw a grenade that fatally wounded a U.S. soldier, according to classified photographs and defence documents obtained by the Star.
Standing up for the Rule of Law
Note: This piece was subsequently published on March 26, 2009 in the StarPhoenix. Available online here
Due process is a long-standing Canadian principle. It is enshrined in our legal tradition as a safeguard against the denial of liberty. It is a part of our liberal democracy that distinctly separates us from the dictatorships scattered around the world today. Yet, certain Canadians are being apparently denied their basic rights as citizens.
Consider the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik. Since 2003, Abdelrazik has languished in limbo in Khartoum, Sudan and currently lives in the lobby of the Canadian embassy. His ill-fated trip to Khartoum in 2003 to visit his ailing mother ended in secret detention under the country’s notorious domestic security agency, which newly de-classified documents show acted on the request of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
He was repeatedly detained for a total of nineteen months. No charges. No trial. No conviction. A Canadian citizen – arbitrarily detained at the behest of Canada, by a disreputable foreign regime whose president was indicted this month by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. Abdelrazik says he was tortured by his Sudanese captors, and has the scars to show it.
Sudan’s dismal human rights record speaks for itself. CSIS agents visited and interrogated Abdelrazik during his imprisonment. Documents reveal that Canadian diplomats in Khartoum were told to not provide him with his right to consular support during interrogations by Sudanese and American officials.
Today, Abdelrazik lives in virtual exile – denied the right to come back to Canada and to his family. Sudan says it has no reason to hold him and has cleared him of the suspicions laid out by CSIS. It even offered to fly him back to Canada.
Although the federal government has tried to get Abdelrazik removed from an international no-fly list, it has still raised road-blocks to prevent his return. When he did find ways to return, like arranging a flight out of Sudan, he was refused a passport. Why?
It is alarming to see Sudan more committed to releasing a Canadian than us. When we unlawfully outsource the detention and interrogation of one of our own to an authoritarian state, then we are going down a frightening path of injustice.
Another troubling case is that of Canadian Omar Khadr – a story well known to many of us. Captured as a child soldier in Afghanistan at the age of 15 and held for more than six years at the Guantanamo detention facility without conviction, Omar is the last Western citizen languishing in a place that exists outside the norms of law. His Canadian lawyer, Dennis Edney, has said Omar is a broken person.
Although U.S. president Barack Obama has frozen “trial” proceedings at Guantanamo and is slated to shut the facility down, we have yet to intervene and repatriate this young citizen. This stands in stark contrast to other Western nations like the United Kingdom and France, which have already repatriated their nationals.
For ourselves and our country, some important questions need to be asked. What has happened to the value of Canadian citizenship? Are we being parochial and selective in upholding the rights of our citizens?
And, perhaps most importantly, have we learned from the perilous mistakes that were brought to light during the Arar Inquiry? At this point, it does not seem like we have.
Our government must provide answers and address the unjust plight of Abdelrazik. Indeed, his case and that of Khadr demonstrate a harmful and dangerous erosion of fundamental justice and must not be taken lightly.
At the same time, our courts exist for a reason and they constitute the proper forum to mete out justice with transparency and due process. Canadian courts have successfully convicted those charged with terrorism under the Criminal Code. For example, Momin Khawaja of Ottawa was found guilty of such offences in October 2008 and and was recently sentenced to 10.5 years of jail time.
Yet, for over five years, no grounds or evidence have been offered regarding Abdelrazik. And for six years, the Americans have failed to create a just process for Khadr that is consistent with legal norms and international law.
There is no doubt that national security and collective safety are critical in times like these. But the inalienable rights and citizenship of every Canadian must be upheld and respected.
Let us stand by the timeless Canadian edifice that defines our values and separates us from the agents of chaos and the regimes of repression: the rule of law. In our cherished democracy, real security is the preservation of not only human life, but also of human dignity.
Kashif Ahmed of Law is Cool is a Board Member of CAIR-CAN. Note that this piece is provided for interest alone.
CSIS Snooping on Calls to Your Lawyer
Could CSIS be snooping in on your calls? Routine harassment has been noted where they could not make a legal case. And if they can violate solicitor-client privilege, anything is possible.
The concept of solicitor-client privilege goes back at least 400 years in the common law, and is one of the most well established concepts of privilege in our legal system.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was recently caught listening and recording conversations with Mohamed Zeki Mahjoub and his lawyer since the Egyptian refugee and terrorism suspect was released on bail over a year and a half ago.
When challenged by Justice Carolyn Layden-Stevenson, CSIS lawyer Jim Mathieson agreed that any such recordings would stop, and records would be erased.
But other defence lawyers have now raised some very serious concerns. Dennis Edney, who represents one of the Toronto18 and Omar Khadr said in response,
How can we trust that the system is working appropriately? Every lawyer in this country who’s involved in issues of national security has no way of knowing whether (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) is monitoring their calls.
See the rest of the post over at Slaw.
