{UAH} HE IS SUING AND I CAN BET THEY ARE GOING TO PAY OUT

Canadian sues Ottawa, former foreign minister to erase “terrorist” label

By Steve Mertl

National Affairs Contributor

Abousfian Abdelrazik. Photo courtesy of Radio Canada.I bet you've forgotten all about Abousfian Abdelrazik, if you ever knew about him in the first place.

He's the Canadian who found himself in a Kafkaesque post-9/11 nightmare. He was arrested in 2003 while on a visit to his native Sudan and tortured on suspicion of terrorist connections.

Finally released in 2006, he couldn't get home to his family in Montreal because, despite no evidence against him, his name turned up on a no-fly list. The Canadian government would not issue the documents he needed to get back home, forcing him to camp out in the Canadian embassy for more than a year.

Abdelrazik, who finally got home in 2009, is suing the federal government and former foreign minister Lawrence Cannon for $500,000 and an apology.

His story has elements of the ordeal of Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar, who was grabbed by U.S. agents and sent to Syria while on a flight stopover in New York. He was imprisoned for almost a year and tortured as a suspected Al Qaeda supporter.

A judicial inquiry in 2006 cleared Arar of any terror links and Canadian authorities collaborated in Arar's detention. The government was later forced to apologize and pay him $10.5 million but he remained on a no-fly list for years.

Abdelrazik claims an unidentified government official leaked information suggesting he had links to Al Qaeda, even though the the RCMP and CSIS said there wasn't enough evidence to draw that conclusion. Abdelrazik alleges despite that, CSIS agents questioned him when he was in Sudanese custody.

After he was freed by Sudanese security officials following two stints in jail, Abdelrazik found himself in a bureaucratic maze. He was put on a United Nations blacklist that kept him from flying home.

Despite a supposed commitment from Ottawa to facilitate his return, it refused to issue a special passport, claiming he needed a plane ticket first. When donors helped him obtain one, the government still balked and Abdelrazik found himself couch-surfing in the reception area of the Canadian embassy in Khartoum, looking up at Cannon's portrait.

The Federal Court of Canada eventually ordered the government to allow Abdelrazik's return, ruling in 2009 that CSIS was "complicit" in his detention and that he was "as much a victim of international terrorism as the innocent persons whose lives have been taken by recent barbaric acts of terrorists," CBC News reported at the time.

The following year, Federal Court opened the door for Abdelrazik to sue the government and Cannon, according to CBC News.

The Canadian Press reports Cannon recently spent more than two hours answering questions under oath put by Abdelraik's lawyer, Paul Champ, in a pre-trial examination.

Champ said the closed-door session — details of which remain confidential, for now — was both challenging and cathartic for his client.

"We wanted to ask Mr. Cannon why – why did he turn down that emergency passport despite the fact that Canada had repeatedly promised to Mr. Abdelrazik that he would be allowed to return to Canada," Champ told CP.

Abdelrazik was depressed and even suicidal, to the point embassy staff sought medical help for him, Champ said.

"So we wanted to know to what extent Mr. Cannon was aware of Mr. Abdelrazik’s personal circumstances, and therefore what the personal toll on him was of being left there and stranded in Khartoum," the lawyer said.

According to a Maclean's report last August, Abdelrazik discovered after he returned home that the RCMP had sent letters to cabinet in 2007 formally confirming there was not enough evidence to implicate him in terrorism. Armed with that evidence, he was able to get his name removed from the UN no-fly list in 2011.

Still, he claimed, an unnamed federal official leaked information that resulted in an August 2011 news report alleging he was involved in terrorism between 1997 and 2001, including claims he was part of a plot to attack an airliner flying to France from Montreal, Maclean's said. The information, allegedly based on CSIS documents, also claimed traces of explosives had been found in his car and that he had attended an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.

The RCMP and CSIS letters also form the basis for his suit, alleging the government leaks damaged his reputation, threatened his well-being and caused him emotional and psychological distress, Maclean's reported.

 

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