By Monia Mazigh – In June 2015, John Nuttall and Amanda Korody, two Canadian Muslims, were found guilty of terrorism charges. They were arrested because the RCMP alleged that the pair wanted to blow up the B.C. legislature. Since 2001, several Canadian Muslims have been arrested and convicted of terrorism. One of the most known terrorist cases is the Toronto 18. In that particular case, some defence lawyers tried to argue that their clients had been entrapped by informants who inflamed them and facilitated their plotting. At that time, these arguments were rejected by the judge and several of the accused were convicted of terrorism charges.

What is unusual in the case of Nuttall and Korody is that during their trial, the judge became concerned about the possibility of entrapment of the couple. Indeed, an RCMP undercover officer posing as a rich Arab businessman befriended them and helped them with their plot. During the trial, the head of an RCMP team tasked with investigating possible terror suspects testified at the B.C. Supreme Court “that he had concerns about entrapment and abuse of process near the start of a police sting.”

The couple’s defence lawyer argued that Nuttall and Korody were manipulated by RCMP informants to detonate pressure cooker bombs in the Victoria legislature on Canada Day in 2013. The couple, who converted to Islam, suffers from drug addiction and lived on welfare before they were arrested. Furthermore, police notes suggest that Nuttall could have a “mental developmental delay”. These facts are important to mention because, if the judge founds that entrapment took place, they would add to the evidence that law enforcement has a pattern of targeting vulnerable individuals as potential “wannabe terrorists”.

In 2013, a US Congressional research service report mentioned that “since the September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks, the FBI has implemented a series of reforms intended to transform itself from a largely reactive law enforcement agency focused on investigations of criminal activity into a more proactive, agile, flexible, and intelligence-driven agency that can prevent acts of terrorism.”

Indeed, one of the methods adopted by the law enforcement agency is the introduction of an informant or “agent provocateur” into the life of “vulnerable people” to talk to them and encourage them to commit a terrorist act.

In 2014, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report, “Illusion of Justice”, that documented 27 counterterrorism cases. The HRW report indicates that, “according to multiple studies, nearly 50 percent of the more than 500 federal counterterrorism convictions resulted from informant-based cases; almost 30 percent of those cases were sting operations in which the informant played an active role in the underlying plot”.  Moreover, the report found that in many cases where entrapment had been deployed, people with mental and intellectual disabilities had been targeted.

Back to Canada, the use of entrapment seems to be a possible reality in the case of Chiheb Esseghaier and Raed Jaser. A wealthy Arab businessman, in reality a FBI informant, posed as someone who wanted to help the suspects into conducting violent acts. The mental status of one of the suspects (Chiheb Esseghaier) and the precariousness of the financial situation of Raed Jaser and the legal status of Ahmed Abbasi(1) in Canada (who was released after spending 17 months in detention in the US), were used as vulnerable factors to draw the suspects further into the terrorist act plotting.

This, of course, doesn’t excuse the sympathetic ideas that the suspects hold regarding violent ideologies but nevertheless it is interesting to consider the question: “would they still have planned or committted any acts if the undercover agent didn’t encourage them to do so?”

In Canada, an independent investigation is needed to tell Canadians whether the RCMP has been using the same entrapment strategies as the FBI. The decision of B.C. Supreme Court Justice, Catherine Bruce, regarding the entrapment of Nuttall and Korody could be the best reason to do so. However, the trial has been suspended after CSIS refused once again to turn over documents relating to their involvement in the plot. We could be in the dark for a very long time.

(1) According to Karen Greenberg, the director of the Centre on National Security at Fordham Law School in New York, Ahmed Abassi’s case seems to be the first and only time that the defence of entrapment was successfully used to have terrorism-related charges dropped.

Sources:

http://ici.radio-canada.ca/regions/colombie-britannique/2015/06/14/005-proces-nuttall-korody-terrorisme-inquietudes-human-rights-watch.shtml  

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/18/fbi-wont-explain-its-bizarre-new-way-of-measuring-its-success-fighting-terror/

https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/07/21/illusion-justice/human-rights-abuses-us-terrorism-prosecutions

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/expelled-tunisian-student-suspected-in-via-rail-plot-says-real-instigator-is-mysterious-fbi-agent

http://www.thealfalfafield.com/2016/02/b-c-terror-trial-suspended-indefinitely-after-csis-refuses-to-discuss-their-involvement-in-plot/

By Monia Mazigh – This week, a Radio-Canada investigative reporter found out that the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) has been detaining between 4,000 to 6,000 asylum seekers per year in the last ten years.

It is estimated that 90% of the cases have no security connection. Rather, most of the asylum seekers are detained for administrative reasons, mainly about identity papers. The most troubling part of this investigation is that these asylum seekers, including hundreds of children among them, are detained in facilities where criminal and drug traffickers are also detained. They are held in detention centres or provincial prisons. In 2014-2015, it was reported that the period of detention for the refugee claimants was, on average, 23 days.

The UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants joined his voice to the UN High Commissioner on Refugees to denounce this illegal treatment and to ask Canada to stop the detainment of asylum seekers in prisons.  But so far, Canada didn’t listen to these voices and as of a few days ago, we learned from the media that a 16-year-old Syrian boy would be deported from Toronto by the CBSA to the US.

Under the Canada-US safe third country agreement, refugee claimants are required to request refugee protection in the first country they arrive in. This agreement is part of the US-Canada Smart Border Action Plan. It came into effect in 2004.

In the past years, Amnesty International, the Canadian Council of Refugees and the Canadian Council of churches legally challenged this agreement arguing that it should be considered in breach of the Charter’s obligations since the US doesn’t comply with the Refugee convention and Convention against torture. First, the Federal court agreed with this opinion, but unfortunately, in 2008, the Court of appeal overturned that decision and the court made a final decision to keep the agreement.

This boy, who came to the US with his parents, thought that he would have higher chances of being accepted by Canada since the Liberal government made it as one of its political priorities to accept 25,000 Syrian refugees. He didn’t know about CBSA’s extended powers and the above ongoing detainment practices of refugee claimants.

It should be noted that the 16-year-old boy crossed the border unaccompanied and that would make him normally admissible (given his age) but still the CBSA arrested him and detained him for three weeks in isolation in a detention centre in Toronto. After releasing him, the CBSA ordered the boy to be deported to the US. From there, he will likely be deported to Syria via Egypt.

The fact that this boy was held in solitary confinement is shocking and in total contradiction with what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently asked his Minister of Justice in her mandate letter: to implement the “recommendations from the inquest into the death of Ashley Smith regarding the restriction of the use of solitary confinement and the treatment of those with mental illness.”

Once again, we have a federal agency that is hugely implicated in arresting and detaining people, the most vulnerable ones, with no possibility of redress or appeal. The extended powers that this agency has accumulated since 9/11 are not always justified. Indeed, why do we keep refugee claimants in prison during the time it takes to verify her identity or legal documents?

According to some experts in the field, these abusive arrests can be simply replaced by some simple bail conditions or some presence requirements: for instance, the individual needs to check in with the authorities and not leave the city.

Moreover, these arrests are not even security motivated as it is usually thought or perceived by some. Did the 16-year-old boy present a security threat to Canada? Nothing seems to point in that direction in this case, nor in most other cases of detention since, as we said above, 90% of the 4000 cases of detained claimants have nothing to do with security.

Meanwhile, we don’t know why these arrests are being made. This humiliating and harmful treatment of refugees in the name of security paranoia that is tainting the government’s actions needs to stop. CBSA is one of several agencies that have zero accountability and oversight. This must immediately change.

Sources:

http://ici.radio-canada.ca/regions/ottawa/2016/02/16/005-demandeurs-asile-emprisonnement-canada-nations-unies.shtml

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/02/16/syrian-boy-seeking-refugee-status-ordered-deported-to-united-states_n_9242028.html?utm_hp_ref=canada