This is from the following site.
These advocates would be useful in the Iacobucci hearing. As it is now the hearing is transparently unfair: the terror suspects have no chance to hear any evidence against them and not even their lawyers are part of the in camera hearings. So far there have not even been summaries or any information about who is even being questioned.
September 05, 2007
Special Advocates in National Security Proceedings
“Special advocates” are security-cleared lawyers representing the interests of parties excluded from national security-related hearings in which the government leads secret information. They have been employed extensively in the United Kingdom and, to a lesser degree, in New Zealand in an effort to enhance the fairness of processes that, by denying the party the right to know the case against them, do not meet fair hearing standards. Canada has also used special security-cleared lawyers in proceedings before the Security and Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), and the Arar Commission, among others, and is moving towards a fuller special advocate model in national security proceedings before the Federal Court (particularly in relation to security certificates under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act). A study released August 31, 2007 by Craig Forcese and Lorne Waldman examines the role and utility of special advocates in Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Entitled Seeking Justice in an Unfair Process, the report draws on public source material, but mostly reflects insight obtained via telephone interviews and two London roundtables conducted during the summer of 2007 with over a dozen special advocates, the UK Special Advocates Support Office and several United Kingdom defence counsel and civil society organizations as well as other Canadian and foreign experts. The report concludes that the UK and New Zealand special advocate models suffer from a number of shortcomings, many of which do not exist in the model employed by the Canadian SIRC. he report was commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, with the financial support of the Courts Administration Service, Federal Courts of Canada. It is part of a larger project with the Federal Court of Canada on the Administration of Justice and National Security in Democracies.
The below is part of an article on special advocates available in PDF form at:
http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~cforcese/other/sastudy.pdf
“Special advocates” are security-cleared lawyers representing the interests of parties excluded from national security-related hearings in which the government leads secret information. They have been employed extensively in the United Kingdom and, to a lesser degree, in New Zealand in an effort to enhance the fairness of processes that, by denying the party the right to know the case against them, do not meet fair hearing standards. Canada has also used special security-cleared lawyers in proceedings before the Security and Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), and the Arar Commission, among others, and is moving towards a fuller special advocate model in national security proceedings before the Federal Court (particularly in relation to security certificates under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act). This study examines the role and utility of special advocates in Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. It draws on public source material, but mostly reflects insight obtained via telephone interviews and two London roundtables conducted during the summer of 2007 with over a dozen special advocates, the UK Special Advocates Support Office and several United Kingdom defence counsel and civil society organizations as well as other Canadian and foreign experts. The report concludes that the UK and New Zealand special advocate models suffer from a number of shortcomings, many of which do not exist in the model employed by the Canadian SIRC. This study advises that Canada build on the SIRC model rather than import the UK/New Zealand approach and makes the following specific recommendations: RECOMMENDATION 1: All questions of secrecy in relation to information withheld by the government should be assessed against the same balancing test; specifically, one analogous to that established in section 38 of the Canada Evidence Act in which a judge weighs the public interest in disclosure against the public interest in non-disclosure and is empowered to authorize forms and conditions of disclosure that reflect this balancing. RECOMMENDATION 2: Before even reaching the question of special advocates, a court must be persuaded that other, less rights-impairing alternatives will not preserve a bona fide government interest in secrecy. These alternatives include: • In camera proceedings during which named persons and their counsel are present; and, • In camera proceedings during which named persons’ counsel, but not their clients, are present. RECOMMENDATION 3: In the limited circumstances where alternatives are not reasonably available, a special advocate should be used to press for greater disclosure of secret information to the named person before the Federal Court (pursuant to the Canada Evidence Act-like balancing test discussed above) and, in relation to information that is not disclosed, to test its veracity in active cross-examinations and independent investigation. However, only a special advocate system with the following qualities is acceptable: 1. The government must make full disclosure to the special advocates themselves; 2. Special advocates must be authorized to question the named person after reviewing the secret information;
Seeking Justice in an Unfair Process iii
3. Special advocates must be highly-skilled trial advocates and must be adequately resourced, trained and independent of government, and; 4. The special advocate system must be established by statute, and not as an ad hoc measure. RECOMMENDATION 4: Separate and apart from a special advocate system, the currently undemanding burden of proof and standard of review applied to the government in immigration and other administrative proceedings should be escalated once it becomes clear that life, liberty or security of the person are in peril.
Showing posts with label National security considerations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label National security considerations. Show all posts
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Iacobucci Inquiry: The government's national security dodge
While Iacobucci has not ruled as yet it is clear that most of the inquiry will not be in public. The only public hearings so far have been on who would get standing and on process and scope questions. It is almost a month since the last hearings and there has been absolute silence from the Inquiry website.
Even what Iacobucci has said makes it clear that it is not a public inquiry but what the website itself calls an internal inquiry. It would not surprise me one bit if most of the inquiry is in secret. It remains to be seen if lawyers for the three will even be allowed into the closed sessions. One Arar inquiry a century is more than enough for any government even though it resulted in no one being reprimanded and no attempt to hold those responsible for mistakes (and many of the mistakes were probably not mistakes at all) to be held to account. National security dodges in official newspeak are national security interests that of course protect us against terrorists and enable us to sleep soundly.
National security dodge goes on, even after Arar
Ottawa trying to muzzle inquiry into more torture cases
May 26, 2007 04:30 AM
Thomas Walkom
When Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a full and formal apology to Maher Arar this year for Canada's role in his torture, it seemed as if this particularly unsavoury episode had finally been put to rest.
It had not. The Arar story, chilling enough on its own, is just the most well-documented part of a larger and more disturbing pattern that – on the face of it – appears to detail Canada's deliberate complicity in the torture of Canadian citizens.
And if the federal government has its way, that fuller story will never be publicly revealed.
It's been five months since Harper set up a judicial inquiry into Canada's role in the torture abroad of Canadian citizens Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin.
But since then his government has spent its time strenuously arguing before former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci that he should hold virtually all sessions of his "public" inquiry in secret, with even the three men and their lawyers excluded.
The reason cited is national security.
National embarrassment might be closer to the truth. The judicial inquiry into Arar revealed Canada's security agencies – particularly the RCMP – as both immoral and incompetent.
The exhaustive three-volume report of that inquiry detailed how an innocent man, through no fault of his own, became ensnared in a web of innuendo and falsehood.
It was a web that triggered his 2002 arrest in New York and, ultimately, his removal to Syria for torture and almost a year of imprisonment.
Arar has still not recovered his life.
But what's worse is that his case was not unique. Almalki spent one year and 10 months in a Syrian jail. For El Maati, the penalty for running afoul of Canadian security services was two years and two months in Syrian and Egyptian jails. Nureddin, comparatively lucky, got out after only 34 days in a Syrian dungeon.
The Arar inquiry, which looked tangentially at their cases, concluded that all three had been brutally tortured by jailers determined to wrest information about alleged terrorist connections.
All were interrogated on the basis of information that could have only originated with the RCMP or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
Indeed, the Arar inquiry found that after Almalki had been imprisoned in Syria, delighted Mounties sent his torturers a list of questions they wanted him to answer.
In the end, none of the three Muslim-Canadians was ever charged by any government with any crime.
It seems that the security agencies' interest in the threesome was piqued for a variety of reasons, not all of them illegitimate.
In the early '90s, Almalki worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan for Human Concern International, a still-extant Canadian charity that at the time employed Ahmad Said Khadr as its South Asian director.
Khadr, as it turned out, was also an associate of Osama bin Laden. So, it is not unreasonable that CSIS might want to know what, if anything, Almalki knew about the Al Qaeda chief.
Later, Almalki's company supplied walkie-talkies to the Pakistani army that eventually ended up in the hands of Afghanistan's Taliban government. Given that Pakistan openly supported and supplied the Taliban before 9/11, this in itself is not remarkable. But one can see why CSIS was interested.
El Maati, a truck driver, had been flagged by U.S. border authorities in 2001 for possessing a map of Ottawa that noted the location of so-called sensitive buildings. This may explain CSIS' interest in him, although if the agency had bothered to do what Globe And Mail reporter Jeff Sallot did one afternoon four years later, they would have discovered that this map is routinely handed out by government commissionaires to anyone who asks.
El Maati's brother Amr also ended up on the FBI's terrorist list. But that happened while Ahmad was being interrogated and tortured in Syria – which suggests the troubling possibility of evidence being produced under coercion to justify that coercion.
Indeed, the problem with these cases has nothing to do with the questions asked by CSIS or the RCMP. Rather, it has to do with the lengths to which they were willing to have their Syrian and Egyptian friends go to get the preconceived answers they wanted.
Or, at least, that's the way it seems.
But we won't know for sure unless the government eases up and lets Iacobucci conduct a public inquiry that is actually public. He's expected to rule on that question as early as next week.
With luck, he won't fall for the government's now discredited national security wheeze.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
twalkom@thestar.ca
Even what Iacobucci has said makes it clear that it is not a public inquiry but what the website itself calls an internal inquiry. It would not surprise me one bit if most of the inquiry is in secret. It remains to be seen if lawyers for the three will even be allowed into the closed sessions. One Arar inquiry a century is more than enough for any government even though it resulted in no one being reprimanded and no attempt to hold those responsible for mistakes (and many of the mistakes were probably not mistakes at all) to be held to account. National security dodges in official newspeak are national security interests that of course protect us against terrorists and enable us to sleep soundly.
National security dodge goes on, even after Arar
Ottawa trying to muzzle inquiry into more torture cases
May 26, 2007 04:30 AM
Thomas Walkom
When Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a full and formal apology to Maher Arar this year for Canada's role in his torture, it seemed as if this particularly unsavoury episode had finally been put to rest.
It had not. The Arar story, chilling enough on its own, is just the most well-documented part of a larger and more disturbing pattern that – on the face of it – appears to detail Canada's deliberate complicity in the torture of Canadian citizens.
And if the federal government has its way, that fuller story will never be publicly revealed.
It's been five months since Harper set up a judicial inquiry into Canada's role in the torture abroad of Canadian citizens Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin.
But since then his government has spent its time strenuously arguing before former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci that he should hold virtually all sessions of his "public" inquiry in secret, with even the three men and their lawyers excluded.
The reason cited is national security.
National embarrassment might be closer to the truth. The judicial inquiry into Arar revealed Canada's security agencies – particularly the RCMP – as both immoral and incompetent.
The exhaustive three-volume report of that inquiry detailed how an innocent man, through no fault of his own, became ensnared in a web of innuendo and falsehood.
It was a web that triggered his 2002 arrest in New York and, ultimately, his removal to Syria for torture and almost a year of imprisonment.
Arar has still not recovered his life.
But what's worse is that his case was not unique. Almalki spent one year and 10 months in a Syrian jail. For El Maati, the penalty for running afoul of Canadian security services was two years and two months in Syrian and Egyptian jails. Nureddin, comparatively lucky, got out after only 34 days in a Syrian dungeon.
The Arar inquiry, which looked tangentially at their cases, concluded that all three had been brutally tortured by jailers determined to wrest information about alleged terrorist connections.
All were interrogated on the basis of information that could have only originated with the RCMP or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
Indeed, the Arar inquiry found that after Almalki had been imprisoned in Syria, delighted Mounties sent his torturers a list of questions they wanted him to answer.
In the end, none of the three Muslim-Canadians was ever charged by any government with any crime.
It seems that the security agencies' interest in the threesome was piqued for a variety of reasons, not all of them illegitimate.
In the early '90s, Almalki worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan for Human Concern International, a still-extant Canadian charity that at the time employed Ahmad Said Khadr as its South Asian director.
Khadr, as it turned out, was also an associate of Osama bin Laden. So, it is not unreasonable that CSIS might want to know what, if anything, Almalki knew about the Al Qaeda chief.
Later, Almalki's company supplied walkie-talkies to the Pakistani army that eventually ended up in the hands of Afghanistan's Taliban government. Given that Pakistan openly supported and supplied the Taliban before 9/11, this in itself is not remarkable. But one can see why CSIS was interested.
El Maati, a truck driver, had been flagged by U.S. border authorities in 2001 for possessing a map of Ottawa that noted the location of so-called sensitive buildings. This may explain CSIS' interest in him, although if the agency had bothered to do what Globe And Mail reporter Jeff Sallot did one afternoon four years later, they would have discovered that this map is routinely handed out by government commissionaires to anyone who asks.
El Maati's brother Amr also ended up on the FBI's terrorist list. But that happened while Ahmad was being interrogated and tortured in Syria – which suggests the troubling possibility of evidence being produced under coercion to justify that coercion.
Indeed, the problem with these cases has nothing to do with the questions asked by CSIS or the RCMP. Rather, it has to do with the lengths to which they were willing to have their Syrian and Egyptian friends go to get the preconceived answers they wanted.
Or, at least, that's the way it seems.
But we won't know for sure unless the government eases up and lets Iacobucci conduct a public inquiry that is actually public. He's expected to rule on that question as early as next week.
With luck, he won't fall for the government's now discredited national security wheeze.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
twalkom@thestar.ca
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