Standing up for a killer

by Ed Morgan

This commentary was first published in the National Post on June 11, 2004.

This week's United Nations Human Rights Committee (HRC) ruling criticizing Canada's expulsion of Mansour Ahani is shot through with high-minded rhetoric about the right of persons to be free from torture. But it should give comfort to no one. Ahani was found by the Federal Court of Canada to be an Iranian government assassin, part of a hit team targeting pro-democracy dissidents abroad. The HRC's ruling is so loopy that even Canada, the UN's biggest booster state, is properly ignoring it.

The admonishment of Canada doubtless amused readers of this newspaper. After all, it was a Iranian journalist commissioned by the National Post who photographed and interviewed a smiling Mr. Ahani sitting on his parents' front porch in Tehran, alive and well, many months after he supposedly disappeared into the Iranian gulag. The erstwhile refugee claimant could barely contain his scorn for the gullibility of our legal system, which afforded him nearly a decade of due process.

Sadly, the Ahani case is part of a pattern by which those Western nations with the most exemplary legal systems are upbraided by the HRC -- even as far greater outrages in Third World dictatorships are ignored.

The Human Rights Committee is an adjudicative body composed of experts that is mandated to objectively weigh evidence submitted by individual human-rights complainants on a case-by-case basis. As it turns out, Canada, Scandianavian countries, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand all receive more than their share of attention. Sweden has been the subject of several committee rulings having to do with the power of a state to detain or expel alien terror suspects. In one case, for instance, the Swedish government was admonished for keeping an alleged member of the Kurdish Workers Party under a form of "house arrest" that required him to remain not exactly in his home but within his home municipality of Vasterhaninge, a bedroom community some 25 kilometres south of Stockholm. The complainant was suspected of involvement in the murder of a rival Kurdish activist in Uppsala, and would have been expelled to his native Turkey had it not been for the Swedish government's assessment that suspected Kurdish terrorists face potential mistreatment if subject to "refoulement" (to use the refined vocabulary of the United Nations).

Instead of sending him packing, the Swedes confined him to his suburb. That, according to the HRC, was unacceptably harsh.

In another case, the Swedish police uncovered a plot by several urban guerrillas imported from other European countries -- most notably Greece and Germany -- to abduct members of the Swedish government. One of them, a Greek immigrant who had been expelled to her native land, sought adjudication at the Human Rights Committee because of the harsh consequences of the ejection. The stigma of her arrest and deportation, she argued, made it impossible to find suitable employment back in Athens. She may have had a point, the committee noted, but her appeal was rejected on procedural grounds: The HRC grudgingly agreed with the Swedes that the complainant really ought not to have snuck back into Sweden in order to challenge the deportation order a second time.

In one of the committee's leading cases, a co-founder of Hezb Ennahda, a North African Islamic movement whose leaders are found mostly in Tunisian prisons and Paris cafes, filed a complaint against a French magistrate's order that he distance himself from his alleged co-conspirators by reporting daily to a police station in the southeast district of the country. This picturesque confinement, which was to last until France could find a country willing to accept him (deportation to his native Tunisia having been ruled out as too risky a proposition), was said by the complainant to be too harsh as it was more than 1,000 kilometres from his wife in Paris. To the committee's credit, it noted that the wife could move to the husband rather than the husband moving back to the wife.

The committee is far from an overworked institution, but one could go on at some length describing the recent jurisprudence. Ireland has been admonished for implementing special court procedures for witnesses and informants who require protection, without first advising the accused terrorist of the specific details giving rise to the need for protection. South Korea has been criticized for violating free speech by confiscating pamphlets from a person who had confessed to espionage and had just returned from an illegal trip to North Korea. Australia, unlike some other countries, is in the habit of actually deporting large numbers of unsuccessful asylum seekers, and has been condemned by the committee for this practice.

In other words, despite its pretence of political neutrality, the HRC is a sort of microcosm of the United Nations as a whole -- a body obsessed with the alleged slights perpetrated by the civilized West, even as it largely ignores the murderous outrages perpetrated by Sudan, Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba and other dictatorships.

Ahanis stands as an icon not just for our government's gullibility, but for the warped priorities of an institution so many Canadians mistakenly venerate.