Court to be asked to quash certificate, rule on CSIS conduct

Richard Foot, The Ottawa Citizen, Thursday, January 31, 2008

Adil Charkaoui, the Montreal immigrant and accused al-Qaeda sympathizer, returns to the Supreme Court today to try to quash the federal government's bid to deport him to Morocco under a controversial security certificate.

While supporters rally outside the Supreme Court, Mr. Charkaoui's lawyers will also ask the country's top judges to rule on the overall conduct of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service during its investigation of Mr. Charkaoui since 2001.

They say the national spy agency has unfairly manipulated its evidence on Mr. Charkaoui, publicly smearing him with leaks of harmful information, while at the same time destroying evidence that might help exonerate him.

Mr. Charkaoui is one of six people currently facing deportation under a federal security certificate, a contentious immigration measure that allows authorities to arrest and expel non-citizens suspected of being national security threats.

Mr. Charkaoui and three other terror suspects won a landmark judgment from the Supreme Court last year. It said that, while security certificates were necessary in an age of terrorism, the current system was unconstitutional because it violated the right of suspects to know the government's secret evidence against them.

The Conservative government has responded with legislation to create "special advocates" -- lawyers appointed to represent the interests of accused people, but whose access to the accused and the evidence can be restricted.

Unless Parliament passes those amendments by Feb. 23, the security certificate regime will automatically expire, as ordered by the Supreme Court.

Whether or not the law survives, Mr. Charkaoui and his lawyers say the Supreme Court should toss out his security certificate because of improprieties in the way CSIS allegedly handled the investigation.

They say CSIS was wrong to destroy recordings and notes of its interviews with Mr. Charkaoui from 2002, and to only disclose summaries of those interviews in 2005, at a court hearing on the reasonableness of the Charkaoui certificate.

While the summaries suggest Mr. Charkaoui had inside knowledge of jihadist recruitment efforts in Canada before 9/11, his lawyers say the full details of the interviews, now destroyed, could help exonerate him.

They also say that much of the evidence collected by CSIS came from other terror suspects in Canada and overseas, which was obtained through coercion.

All of this, says Mr. Charkaoui's lawyer, Dominique Larochelle, breaches the fairness of the proceedings.

"We're talking about the way witnesses were interviewed by CSIS and the way information was gathered. That kind of information must be disclosed to allow the court to assess the value of the evidence," she said.

"We're also talking about destroyed evidence. We assume a lot of relevant information has been destroyed."