'Canada denied men due process in probe of Syrian torture case'

Amnesty International: Closed-door inquiry of three Arab-Canadians who say they were tortured in Syria too secretive to yield genuine findings.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
jail 88 (photo credit: Courtesy)
jail 88
(photo credit: Courtesy)
A commission investigating Canada's role in the detention of three Arab-Canadians who say they were tortured in Syria has been so secretive that the men were denied due process, Amnesty International said on Monday. Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International's Canadian chapter, said the federal government's closed-door inquiry into torture allegations made by Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin, cannot be considered fair or just. "This is an inquiry that has extended secrecy to everything, not just the national security concerns. We're used to private legal proceedings when national security is at stake. But here it went too far, excluding the suspects and public from the proceedings in their entirety," said Neve from his Ottawa office. A report on the inquiry's findings was released to the Privy Council Office, which advises the prime minister, on Monday, but it's not clear when the government will make the findings public. The Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper named former Canadian Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci last December to investigate allegations by Almalki, El Maati and Nureddin that they were tortured in Syria after traveling there separately on personal business between 2001 to 2003. None has been charged with a crime. The trio says they believe the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or intelligence officials tipped off foreign intelligence agencies about their travel plans to the Middle East and provided questions to their captors. All deny terrorist ties. The men want to know whether the Canadian government orchestrated their overseas interrogations in cooperation with foreign allies. The commission's probe was carried out almost entirely out of the public eye, which means that the men and their lawyers have had no chance to see evidence filed in the proceedings or to attend hearings and interviews with Canadian officials. Lawyers were allowed to see and file responses to a draft narrative of facts compiled by the commission, but were forbidden to share the information with their clients. "How can we trust the findings of an inquiry that has heard only one side of the story?" asked El Maati, who was arrested in November 2001 when he flew to Syria to celebrate his wedding. The so-called confessions extracted under torture from El Maati were used to justify a telephone wiretap in Canada. After several weeks in Syria, he was flown to Egypt and further brutalized during two years of detention there. Neruddin, an Iraqi-born Canadian, was detained in Syria in December 2003 while crossing the Iraq-Syrian border on his way back to Canada. He said he was tortured and held by interrogators who asked him questions that were fed to them by Canadian officials. He was released from jail in January 2004. Almalki, a Syrian-born engineer living in Canada, said he was visiting relatives in Syria in 2002 when he was arrested on suspicion of ties to terrorists based on information provided by the Canadian government. He was released by Syrian authorities in July 2004 and cleared of any terrorist links. John Laskin, chief counsel for the inquiry, said last week that the terms of reference drawn up by the government left Iacobucci no choice but to hear most of the evidence in private for national security reasons.