A commission investigating Canada’s role in the detention of three Arab-Canadians who say they were tortured in Syria has been so secretive that the men were denied due process, Amnesty International said on Monday.
Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International’s Canadian chapter, said the federal government’s closed-door inquiry into torture allegations made by Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin, cannot be considered fair or just.
“This is an inquiry that has extended secrecy to everything, not just the national security concerns. We’re used to private legal proceedings when national security is at stake. But here it went too far, excluding the suspects and public from the proceedings in their entirety,” Neve said from his office in Ottawa.
A report on the inquiry’s findings was released to the Privy Council Office, which advises the prime minister, on Monday, but it was not clear when the government would make the findings public.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper named former Canadian Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci in December to investigate allegations by Almalki, El Maati and Nureddin that they were tortured in Syria after traveling there separately on personal business between 2001 to 2003. None has been charged with a crime.
The three say they believe the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or intelligence officials tipped off foreign intelligence agencies about their travel plans to the Middle East and provided questions to their captors. The men want to know whether the Canadian government orchestrated their overseas interrogations in cooperation with foreign allies.
The commission’s probe was carried out almost entirely out of the public eye, which means that the men and their lawyers have had no chance to see evidence filed in the proceedings or to attend hearings and interviews with Canadian officials. Lawyers were allowed to see and file responses to a draft narrative of facts compiled by the commission, but were forbidden to share the information with their clients.
“How can we trust the findings of an inquiry that has heard only one side of the story?” asked El Maati, who was arrested in November 2001 when he flew to Syria to celebrate his wedding.
John Laskin, chief counsel for the inquiry, said last week the terms of reference drawn up by the government left Iacobucci no choice but to hear most of the evidence in private for national security reasons.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS