Attention: Immigration Minister, Denis Coderre & Solicitor General, Wayne Easter

June 6, 2003

Citizenship & Immigration Minister Denis Coderre
4975 de Charleroi
Montréal North, Québec
H1G 2Z2

Wayne Easter
Solicitor General of Canada
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0A6
Fax (613) 990-9077

Dear Mr. Coderre & Mr. Easter,

We deliver this letter in protest of the recent arrest and detention of Mr. Adil Charkaoui under warrant by the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act - "Security Certificate". On May 16th, 2003, you both reviewed information submitted by CSIS which proclaimed they had "reasonable grounds" to believe that Adil Charkaoui is a "danger to national security". In the eye of the public, this accusation is totally groundless. In the eye of Adil Charkaoui's parents and friends, it is entirely wrong.

Mr. Charkaoui is a 30 year old landed immigrant from Morocco, a father of one with another child on the way. He has taught the French language at many institutions, including a Jewish school. He was presently completing a Masters' degree at Université de Montréal. On May 21, six full days after the warrant was issued, Adil was arrested in Montreal by ten armed enforcement officers, from five different agencies - RCMP, CSIS, Canada Customs, Surete du Quebec and Montreal police. Adil Charkaoui is currently being held in the Rivière-des-Prairies Detention Centre. We say that he is innocent until proved guilty, and demand that he be released.

Broadcast News reported CSIS and RCMP had Mr. Charkaoui under surveillance for at least 10 days. If CSIS and RCMP believed Mr. Charkaoui is a "danger", as they stated in order to receive the Security Certificate, why the delay in picking him up? We find the timing of the arrest suspicious. Did CSIS and RCMP wait for news that could be "associated" with the arrest of Mr. Charkaoui, thereby pinning guilt-by-association allegations? The raising of the US "terror alert", and bombings in Casablanca, Morocco (including the bombing of a Jewish community center) provided the perfect backdrop for his stage-managed arrest, and offered another opportunity for Canada to "prove" to the U.S. our "seriousness" in cracking down in the "war on terror". It is well-known that Morocco would not support the US-led invasion of Iraq. To us at home, here in Canada, we do not have a war on "terror" but instead, a war on our democracy.

A similar "coincidence" occurred December 10, 2002, when Ottawa resident, Mohamed Harkat, originally from Algeria, was also arrested on a security certificate. Headlines reading "Canadian tied to al-Qaeda arrested" were everywhere as Solicitor General Wayne Easter went to Washington the next day to tell the Americans how much Canada was doing to stop alleged "terrorists." Mr. Harkat, whose hearing comes up in July, has been in solitary confinement in an Ottawa Detention Centre ever since.

In 2001, Mr. Charkaoui was stopped by government agents at Dorval airport (as he was leaving for Morocco) and told he was "suspected of knowing certain people", and told to spy on members of Montreal's Muslim community. Mr. Charkaoui refused this request. Now Mr. Charkaoui is said to be suspected of having links to members of an Al-Qa'ida cell active in Montreal in the late 1990s. In a recent jailhouse interview Charkaoui said, "I have no links to Al-Qaeda. This is a new form of McCarthyism, a new witch hunt. There's no proof, only suspicions. If they have proof they should show it."

This is becoming a popularly recognized pattern with CSIS. Others arrested on security certificates report a similar pattern: demands from CSIS to spy on members of specific communities and, if not accepted, the security certificate comes down as punishment. We ask you, Mr. Coderre and Easter, how thoroughly did you review information submitted by CSIS? How did you ascertain if it was true or not, knowing that neither Mr. Adil Charkaoui, nor his lawyer, would have the chance to view the evidence and thus prove his innocence? Knowing that approval of the certificate would leave Adil's wife, children, and other family members devastated, torn apart. Knowing Mr. Charkaoui faces arrest, detention, torture or possibly death in Morocco precisely because of these allegations. You know if the judge declares the certificate "reasonable", Adil and his family will have no recourse to an appeal.

Mr. Charkaoui's arrest takes place amidst active CSIS and RCMP harassment of Canada's Muslim communities, especially focused on individuals of Middle Eastern and Arabic heritage. In a little-publicized report released this May by International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, entitled "In the Shadow of the Law," it was reported that in "hundreds" of instances, people in Canada "are being visited for interviews by security forces without warrants, and taken away for interrogation. Although the full extent of Bill C-36 was not implemented in these cases, it has been used as a threat to 'encourage' voluntary interviews by citing the risk of preventative detention allowed under the Act. Victims of such police conduct have been afraid to come forward publicly for fear of further retaliation." Recent studies also show information obtained under (Reid) interrogation techniques, is often false information (see: http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/01/27/interrogation030127).

"We are really shocked and disappointed," said Salam Elmenyawi, president of the Muslim Council of Montreal, who described Adil Charkaoui as a student of French literature who has no interest in terrorism. "Deporting someone based on secret evidence that neither he nor his lawyer is allowed to know is totally unacceptable."

Nicole Currier of CSIS said Mr. Charkaoui was the subject of a lengthy investigation by CSIS, which formed the basis of the security intelligence report that you, Mr. Coderre and Mr. Easter reviewed. We hope you have also researched the recent history of CSIS corruption, incompetence, bias and abuse. We refer here only to public criticisms made by the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), whom we also know are highly critical regarding the lack of transparent information they themselves receive from CSIS.

SIRC's 1999-2000 report raised questions "about some beliefs the Service has about the nature of the threat. We are of the opinion that these beliefs are sometimes overdrawn". In one case SIRC said a CSIS application for warrant powers contained "a number of overstatements", while in another they said, "information put forward was more than a decade old and the information adduced was derived from one source's 'feelings'" and, "One source's speculation was quoted. Some assertions that the target engaged in 'suspicious activities' appeared to us to be misleading or exaggerated".

Are you sure this is not the case for Mr. Adil Charkaoui? It will be too late for him if SIRC decides to do a review of his case in the future, after his deportation has been accomplished. The report continues: "For another person targeted, [CSIS] failed to include in the affidavit significant information of which it was aware which contradicts its own position on the person". And in yet another case, a hyperactive CSIS treated as a threat an activity that "seemed to be routine diplomatic behaviour," while in another case, "with little corroborating information, CSIS ascribed intelligence gathering motives to apparently normal consular contacts". The SIRC report concludes: we need the best possible national security advice "unencumbered by unfounded speculation."

Also CSIS agents are generally not as knowledgeable as they make themselves out to be. The following incompetence of a CSIS "expert" was displayed in an exchange during the hearing of Mahmoud Jaballah:

"David", a self-described expert on Middle East terrorism, was asked by Jaballah's lawyer, Rocco Galati, what constituted an Arab country, to which "David" replied, "More often than not, countries in the Middle East." Galati then asked whether Iran were an Arabic country.

"I would say it is Arabic, but I'm not an expert in Iranian affairs," David said.

"You are completely wrong, Iran is as far from being Arab as Germany is," Galati replied. "If I suggested to you that your experience is anemic and that you need some re-education, what would you say to me?"

David said, "I would say that the Service goes to great effort to make sure that their people are properly trained and culturally sensitized. We do have training in that area."

Galati followed up by asking, "Can you name me the Arab countries along the North African coast?" David could not. "Could you tell me the population of Egypt?" Galati asked the "expert David." David could not.

These few examples of "reasonable grounds" your CSIS agents rely upon, may be the substance of the report on Mr. Charkaoui. How thoroughly did you check? Mr. Charkaoui is a permanent resident who applied for Canadian citizenship since 1999, but was rejected for reasons never explained to him. This time-frame approximately corresponds with the period in which CSIS agents tried to persuade Mr. Charkaoui to spy on the Muslim community in Montreal, but were refused. This also corresponds with the period in which Mr. Charkaoui was questioned by FBI agents as to the names of students he taught in a self-defense course at a Montreal mosque.

The Canadian Islamic Congress reports hate crimes against Muslims have increased 1600% since Sept. 11, 2001. The media is guilty of fanning the flames of intolerance. The Canadian Islamic Congress identifies what it calls "image distortion disorder," a condition that arises from constant repetition of key phrases in the media, like "Islamic-inspired terrorist attacks" and "Islamic militant" to "Muslim militant" and "Islamic fundamentalist."

This distortion of Islam's adherents "inevitably leads to discrimination, hate-mongering, acts of vandalism, and false accusations by authorities. Young Muslim Canadians of dark complexion, especially women with hijabs (traditional head coverings), or males with full beards, are particularly vulnerable to anxiety, fear and discrimination because of society's perception that their religion is violent, backward, restrictive, fundamentalist, and intolerant of opposing or alternative viewpoints." (Full report at: www.canadianislamiccongress.com). CSIS agents are not immune from this bias.

Attorney Rocco Galati, the only lawyer in Canada to win a security certificate case, says there are no judicial checks against the formidable powers "security" agencies have in such situations; making the courts an investigative tool of CSIS, without any judicial balancing to protect the rights of the individual in question. Once in court, the facts of the case are not what is judged. Rather, all the judge determines is whether the certificate is "reasonable." In the "Suresh" security certificate case, for example, the judge stated, "I am here to determine whether there exists sufficient evidence for me to conclude as to the reasonableness of the certificate signed by the ministers. It is not for me to determine whether the ministers were correct in their assessment of the evidence."

In the Mahjoub security certificate decision, the judge stated that all that is necessary for CSIS and the government to prove are " 'reasonable grounds to believe certain facts' as opposed to the existence of the facts themselves." Federal Court judges, before whom the secret trials are conducted, are apparently unhappy with this process. Federal Court Justice James K. Hugessen recently made these statements at a conference in Montreal last year:

"All the national security functions which are laid on the Federal Court have this in common: … a judge of the Court sitting alone in what are called hearings, but they are held in the absence of one of the parties.. That is to say ex parte so that the judge may, if he or she sees fit, take communication of the evidence, the information which is said to be too sensitive to be allowed to be revealed to the person concerned and not only evidence, but also argument which may rely on the evidence or may deal with matters which may be too sensitive to be revealed to the public.

"This is not a happy posture for a judge, and you are in fact looking at an unhappy camper when I tell you about this function. Often, when I speak in public I make the customary disavowal that I am not speaking for the Court and I am not speaking for my colleagues but I am speaking only for myself. I make no such disavowal this afternoon. I can tell you because we talked about it, we hate it…We do not like this process of having to sit alone hearing only one party, and looking at the materials produced by only one party…If there is one thing that I learned in my practice at the Bar, and I have managed to retain it through all these years, it is that good cross-examination requires really careful preparation and a good knowledge of your case. And by definition, judges do not do that … we do not have any knowledge except what is given to us and when it is only given to us by one party we are not well suited to test the materials that are put before us.

"We greatly miss, in short, our security blanket which is the adversary system that we were all brought up with and that, as I said at the outset, is for most of us, the real warranty that the outcome of what we do is going to be fair and just ... it might be helpful if we created some sort of system somewhat like the public defender system where some lawyers were mandated to have full access to the CSIS files, the underlying files, and to present whatever case they could against the granting of the relief sought … I am not sure what the judges of the Federal Court are doing in this picture and if I may be forgiven for using the expression, I sometimes feel a little bit like a fig leaf."

CSIS needs "enemies" to justify its massive budget increase following Sept. 11, 2001. It needs new "threats" to maintain its new funding levels. Mr. Charkaoui and his family are not the only victims of this process. Right now in Canada, there are others fighting the certificate process, including Mahmoud Jaballah, a father of six, who was arrested in 1999 and held seven months before released in an unprecedented move, in which the Federal Court found that Jaballah was credible and CSIS was not. A year later, a disgruntled CSIS brought a new certificate against Jaballah, admitting in court they had no new evidence, only new "interpretations" of "evidence' already found not credible by the court. Muhammad Mahjoub (two children) has been in jail since June, 2000 on a certificate. Hassan Almrei has been in jail since October 2001, and Mohamed Harkat since December 10, 2002. You, Mr. Coderre and Mr. Easter, are the proverbial gatekeepers of this Security Certificate process. You are the front-line in judging validity of CSIS claims. You have the power to reject CSIS applications for Security Certificates, and it is your duty to investigate the nature of CSIS's claims. As US Supreme Court Justice Jackson said in Knauff v. Shaughnessy:

"The plea that evidence of guilt must be secret is abhorrent to free men, because it provides a cloak for the malevolent, the misinformed, the meddlesome, and the corrupt to play the role of informer undetected and uncorrected." (U.S. ex rel. Knauff v. Shaughnessy, 338 U.S. 537, 551 (Jackson, J., dissenting)).

Did you investigate to determine whether information CSIS was relying upon was in fact "malevolent, misinformed, meddlesome, or corrupt"? Under current conditions, where judges feel like "fig leafs", "justice" cannot prevail. When an accused cannot rebut secret evidence against him, i.e. prove he is not a terrorist regardless of what might be implied by government's confidential information, it is difficult to imagine how someone innocent of all wrongdoing could meet such a burden.

You have judged wrongly, Mr. Coderre and Mr. Easter. Adil Charkaoui is a victim at the very least of CSIS incompetence, possibly even scape-goating. In solidarity with Adil Charkaoui, his family, and all Middle Eastern, Arabic and Muslim peoples we THEREFORE demand the following:

1) That Adil Charkaoui be released immediately, and those who are being held under security certificates.

2) That Adil Charkaoui not be deported

3) That Adil Charkaoui be allowed due process: the right to a fair trial, the right to know what he is charged with, the right to hear evidence against him and the right to defend himself in court.

4) That the secretive and anti-democratic Security Certificate mechanism be abolished immediately.

5) That Canada stop using scapegoats to prove to the Bush administration their commitment to security issues.

6) That Canada stop the ongoing racist harassment of Muslims and Canadians of Middle Eastern and Arabic heritage.

Sincerely,

The Justice Coalition for Adil Charkaoui

Endorsed by:

Montreal Collective Opposed to Police Brutality / Collectif Opposé à la Brutalité Policière – Montréal; Collective Opposed to Police Brutality - Vancouver (COPB-Van); Homes not Bombs;  Toronto Action for Social Change; Fire this Time Movement for Social Justice, Vancouver; Indigenous People's Solidarity Movement, Montreal; Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP); OPIRG-Carleton; QPIRG-Mcgill; NDP - Westmount; Muslim Council Of Montreal; United Muslim Students' Association (UMSA); Block The Empire-Montreal; Jewish Alliance Against The Occupation; Direct Case Action Network; and OCVC (Objection de conscience / Voices of Conscience).