Posts by Garrett Zehr
UN blacklist a stain on international justice
Abousfian Abdelrazik has overcome another hurdle in his long struggle for justice.
On November 30, the Montreal resident was finally removed from the United Nations Security Council 1267 List. The blacklist imposes an asset freeze, travel ban and arms embargo on alleged associates of Al Qaida and the Taliban.
But despite his new freedom, Abdelrazik’s fight is far from over.
Still outstanding are a $27-million lawsuit against the Canadian government, a constitutional challenge to the legislation implementing the 1267 list sanctions, and an apology from the Canadian government for its role in Abdelrazik’s almost decade-long saga that could have been written by Kafka.
Arriving in Canada as a refugee, Abdelrazik was given Canadian citizenship in 1995. He returned to Sudan, where he is a dual citizen, to visit his sick mother in 2003. There he was arrested, imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured. He was never charged with any crime and was eventually cleared by both the Sudanese government and Canada’s RCMP and CSIS of any criminal wrongdoing.
However the Canadian government refused to issue Abdelrazik a passport to return to Canada, using the 1267 List as an excuse. Abdelrazik’s name had been added to the list in 2006 at the request of the United States.
Abdelrazik spent the next 14 months sleeping on a cot in the Canadian embassy. Finally in 2009, Federal Court of Canada judge Russel…
Bush, torture, and politics trumping law
Human rights and anti-war activists greeted former U.S. President George W. Bush’s visit to British Columbia last month with calls for his arrest. The demonstrators correctly asserted that Canada has a responsibility to investigate Bush for his role in the torture of detainees in U.S. custody.
A visit by former Vice President Dick Cheney in September received a similar welcome, as have other visits by Bush administration officials. Already in 2004, a group called Lawyers Against the War tried to bring torture charges against Bush by filing criminal charges.
The number of voices calling for investigation and prosecution is growing and now includes several mainstream human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. On the political stage, federal NDP Immigration critic Don Davis urged the government to deny Cheney entry into Canada.
The evidence against Bush and Cheney also continues to mount. The Canadian Centre for International Justice teamed up with the New York based Center for Constitutional Rights to file a 70-page draft indictment against Bush ahead of his visit to Canada. The indictment was accompanied by 4000 pages of evidence that described the U.S. program of extraordinary rendition, the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and secret CIA detention sites.
Bush himself has on various occasions admitted to authorizing torture techniques, such as waterboarding. In an interview with American journalist Matt Lauer, Bush claimed…
