Former terrorist wants to be lawyer
John Goddard writes for the Toronto Star:
Parminder Singh Saini, 46, blames youth and naïveté for his role in a violent airline hijacking 25 years ago in his native India and says he is rehabilitated.
Mr. Saini was admitted into Canada in 1995 on a fake passport. A few months later, the authorities declared him a national security threat and ordered him deported. As he was fighting this order, Mr. Saini completed a BA at York and a law degree at Windsor. He has already finished his articles. Mr. Saini’s case is now before the Law Society of Upper Canada.
“Over the course of the last 15 years, (Canadian) courts and tribunals have declared that he is a danger to the public and security in Canada and that he shouldn’t remain,” law society counsel Susan Heakes told the hearing this month into whether to accept Saini’s licence application to practise law.
One would think that a law student seeking a law degree in Canada, which probably has no standing in India, has a great deal of respect for the law. One doesn’t make such an effort unless he plans to use it in court, not in a hijacking or in a suicide attack. What good are law degrees if one is dead?