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Canada’s Ambivalent Position
The Canadian government, to its credit, held probing, public
hearings in 2005 into the role played by Canadian officials in Washington’s
shipment of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian extraction, to Syria,
where Syrian authorities predictably tortured him—despite the U.S. government’s
claim to have received assurances from Syria that it would not mistreat him.
In this respect, Canada showed significantly greater concern with a single act
of possible complicity in torture than the U.S. government has shown about its
systematic use of torture. Yet a Canadian law permits the detention and expulsion
of immigrants and refugees on national security grounds to countries where they
risk torture. The Supreme Court of Canada was due to review the
constitutionality of this law in early 2006 to determine whether it infringes
the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The U.N. Human Rights Committee,
in reviewing Canada’s record, said that such transfers “can never be
justified,” echoing concerns expressed in May by the U.N. Committee against
Torture when it reviewed Canada’s compliance with the torture convention.
