If the Justice Dept. gets its way the whole inquiry will lose any credibility and may find itself going ahead without the participation of the very three persons the inquiry was called for in the first place. Somehow if it turned out to be in the interests of the three men and might even provide ammunition for a lawsuit that would somehow defeat the purpose of the inquiry. Apparently the inquiry is not to have anything to do with clearing their names or even finding out whether they were wrongly accused of being terrorists. The inquiry is not even supposed to determine if they were tortured.
JUDICIAL INQUIRY
Men allegedly tortured reject secret proceedings
ALEX DOBROTA
OTTAWA -- Three Canadian men who claim they were tortured as terror suspects in the Middle East could pull out of an inquiry into their ordeal if the Department of Justice succeeds in keeping proceedings secret, their lawyers said yesterday.
"If they are not permitted participation, an option available to them is they can just go home and carry on by themselves," Barbara Jackman, the lawyer for Torontonians Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin, told reporters.
Ms. Jackman presented a similar argument yesterday to retired Supreme Court judge Frank Iacobucci, who chairs the federal judicial inquiry.
Ms. Jackman's clients, together with Abdullah Almalki, an Ottawa businessman, have alleged in separate civil lawsuits that Canadian officials shared intelligence with Syrian and Egyptian authorities, which led to their detention and torture.
The Conservative government called an "internal inquiry" into the matter last December, and the men agreed to halt their lawsuits pending the findings of the inquiry.
At issue now is whether the proceedings should unfold behind closed doors, which would exclude even the complainants and their lawyers from accessing evidence brought forward by the government.
Under the scenario proposed by the Department of Justice, the three men and their lawyers would only make written submissions to the inquiry, without attending hearings.
That would undermine public confidence in the inquiry, the lawyers for the three men said. "It's going to whitewash the government," Ms. Jackman said.
A lawyer for the Department of Justice yesterday argued that the proceedings should be kept secret to prevent the men from using the findings to claim compensatory payments.
"They undoubtedly have other interests beyond the terms of reference [of the inquiry], including significant civil litigation claims that may be pursued," Michael Peirce said. "The internal inquiry should not become a proxy for these other interests."
All three men say they suffered a brutal fate similar to that of Maher Arar, an Ottawa computer engineer who was arrested in the United States and sent to Syria to be tortured as a terror suspect after the RCMP shared erroneous information with U.S. authorities.
Mr. Arar received $10-million from the federal government in a settlement to his lawsuit.
Mr. Almalki is claiming $15-million in damages. He also wants his name cleared of any past terror suspicions, as do the two other men.
"We could pursue those interests much better in that [civil] process than what we're going to get here," said Jasminka Kalajdzic, one of Mr. Almalki's lawyers.
Print E-mail Share License Letter to The Editor
No comments:
Post a Comment