This morning’s news brings Maher Arar back to the front pages, this time with revelations that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and not just the RCMP in collaboration with immigration and security authorities in the United States, had advance knowledge that he would be tortured. If true it is an important disclosure, and calls are rightly being made for an investigation of CSIS’ role in all of this. Indeed, this new angle on the Arar case harks back to accusations of CSIS involvement in the case of another Canadian, Muayyed Nurreddin, who claims that CSIS officials set him up to be abused abroad. Two other Canadians, Abdullah Almalki and Ahmad El Maati, have made similar accusations of collusion by Canadian government authorities in their arrests, interrogation, and torture. Each of these cases is slightly different and each points to different branches of security services on both sides of the Canada – U.S. border. Each one, of course, deserves independent investigation and a legal remedy for wrongs done to the individuals concerned.
There is one common denominator, however, that seems to need so little investigation that it frequently goes unmentioned in news reports, human rights advocacy circles, and elsewhere in the legal and public policy debates around these cases: Syria. We need no judicial inquiry, publicly appointed commission, or litigation and discovery process to know where the torture took place and who the torturers actually were in each of these cases. It all happened in one country – the Syrian Arab Republic. Maher Arar is a Canadian computer consultant who was held without trial and tortured for over a year when ‘renditioned’ back to Syria by U.S. immigration authorities. Abdulla Almalki is a Canadian engineer who was held without trial for 22 months and tortured when he visited Syria on his way back to Canada from Malaysia. Muayyed Nureddin is a Canadian geologist who was detained without trial for one month and tortured when he crossed into Syria by bus from Iraq. Ahmad El Maati is a Canadian truck driver who was detained without trial and tortured for nearly two and a half years when he visited Syria shortly after 9/11. While much needs to be done to unearth the facts and to remedy any domestic Canadian involvement in these cases, not one dime of taxpayer money need be spent to identify the culpable foreign party. Let me repeat it, incase you missed it: SYRIA.
All of which leads me to ask what we are to do about a foreign state that consistently practices the most brutal form of human rights abuse. Where is the call for sanctions against this notorious torture regime, or trade embargos, or for a downgrading or severance of Canada’s diplomatic relations with this oppressive government? Should Canada not be using its considerable prestige and weight in the United Nations and its agencies to ensure that some kind of censure be imposed on a state that has proved time and again to be the nemesis of human rights in general and the rights of Canadian citizens caught in its nets in particular?
I posed this question a year ago to the Canadian branch of Amnesty International, which has done exemplary work in advocating the Arar case and ensuring that the government of Canada provide a remedy, but which until then had been publicly silent on the question of Syria. I was informed by the Secretary General of Amnesty that indeed they had written to Foreign Minister Peter MacKay about this and that they had made the following recommendations (quoting Amnesty’s letter to MacKay, dated October 13, 2006):
- register a formal objection with the Syrian government about the treatment of Mr. Arar, pursuant to Recommendation 22 from the Arar Inquiry report;
- in follow up to the formal objection, demand that independent and impartial investigations be immediately launched into the torture experienced by Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nurreddin, that Canadian officials be kept apprised of the progress of those investigations, that the results be made public and that the investigations lead to criminal charges being laid and pursued against those responsible;
- allow any civil lawsuits brought against Syria in Canadian courts, claiming compensation for torture meted out at the hands of Syrian officials, to go ahead and specifically to support plaintiffs’ arguments that the State Immunity Act should not be applied in such cases;
- consider raising concerns about the prevalence of torture in Syria in front of appropriate multilateral bodies, including the new UN Human Rights Council; and
- ratify the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention against Torture and then press the Syrian government to follow suit.
With all due respect, this is a remarkably toothless list of actions. Taking them one at a time, (a) the world’s foremost torture regime whose penal system is known only for its lack of the rule of law is unlikely to treat a formal objection with anything more than cynicism; (b) once a state turns its prisons into torture chambers and staffs them with experienced torturers, it is unlikely to open them up to investigation at our request; (c) the government of Canada, as Amnesty must know, does not determine civil suits in Canadian courts and, having enacted the State Immunity Act, can hardly be heard to request that a court not apply it; (d) if Canada should only consider raising this concern at the UN Hunan Rights Council, to what extent will a foreign regime have to violate our citizens before we insist that the government raise the point? And finally, (d) yes we ought to ratify the Optional Protocol to the UN Torture Convention, which will allow victims to seek further remedies against us, but the idea that the Syrians might follow our lead because we have asked them to do so and have provided a role model of good behaviour need only be mentioned to be dismissed as a credible approach.
The first question this raises is, how can a hard-hitting human rights organization like Amnesty come up with such a milquetoast set of recommendations, all leveled at one the world’s great rights abusers? The more fundamental question, however, is what can be done about Syria?