Detainees should have rights (Ottawa Citizen)

[struggle4progress]

It is an embarrassment that Canada's Supreme Court won't recognize that the Charter should apply to prisoners of Canadian Forces

By Amir Attaran, Citizen Special May 28, 2009

Some messages cannot be pleasant, so it is best to be blunt: Canada, once a proud human rights leader, is no longer. Particularly in the treacherous area of human rights and the global war on terrorism, Canadian law is not just backwards, but doctrinally more primitive than any other western country. And perhaps worst of all, the Supreme Court of Canada, which might arrest Canada's decline, is not intervening to do so.

Last week, the Supreme Court decided that it would refuse to hear Amnesty International and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association's challenge to the Canadian military's policy of transferring detainees in Afghanistan. This policy, possibly the most controversial of the war (it generated 75 days of debate in Parliament) came under challenge when the rights groups found evidence that the military transferred detainees to known torturers.

The system operates like this: When the Canadian military arrests persons, whether fighters or bystanders, it transports those detainees to an airbase jail under exclusive Canadian control. After some bureaucratic processing but not necessarily any questions, a Canadian commander decides whether to transfer each detainee to Afghanistan's secret police -- a force that even Canadian officials admit uses torture. Canada hands its detainees to the Afghans secretly, without even a hearing to argue their innocence as the Geneva Conventions require. Inspections by Canadian diplomats later found that some of those detainees went missing or were tortured in Afghan hands -- again violations of the law. At worst, the Canadian diplomats found not just a tortured detainee, but also the braided electrical cables used to whip him.

If Canada's war detainees could go to court, doubtless they would, as America's detainees have. But that is impossible when the Canadian military holds them in secret, without lawyers. Thus Amnesty and BCCLA went to court, as proxies for hundreds of them ...

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Detainees+should+have+rights/1637510/story.html

[jeff30997]

1. Thanks Mr Harper.

And a big thanks to all of the idiots who made this possible.:banghead: