Bulgaria's Criminal Is Canada's Citizen Rescue

That's the problem with human institutions; they are only as good as the people who administer them. And given that human beings are equipped with all manner of emotions, values, instincts and modes of behaviour for good and for ill, one can only hope that we as voters are able to discern qualities and select those politicians whose capabilities appear superior over those who clearly are devoid of that royal ruling jelly.

Well, no one's perfect, we all have our faults. Canadian voters selected a man who seemed a relative political novice, one whose apparent ideological underpinnings gave us pause to think twice before committing ourselves to a ruling Conservative party. The result being a minority government. Even that grudging permission to legislate owing more to the complete disillusion suffered by the electorate through the indescribably jejune and corrupt administration of the Liberals.

So the current Government of Canada is displaying its mettle with a different kind of individual at the helm of government. Once viewed as the most right-wing of conservatives, formerly of the Reform, then the Alliance party whose vision of Canada sent anticipatory shivers of doom down most reasonably moderate peoples' spines. But yet a man who is proving to be resolute, practical and refreshingly honest with obvious governing ability.

Some of us have deplored some of the decisions emanating from the prime minister's office affecting Canada's internal governance. Yet on the other hand we have congratulated ourselves for our splendid discernment in electing Stephen Harper, however minimally, at the revelation of other government initiatives, particularly those dealing with Canada's international obligations indicative of our values and traditions. With universal human rights values front and centre.

We don't like everything we see unfolded in this government's decision making. But there are, on balance, a good many more that reverberate with us and one such is the current government's committed activities on behalf of the human rights of Canadians held incarcerated abroad when it is perceived that the countries holding those Canadians are lacking in democratic legitimacy and an independent judiciary.

One such case now being pursued, and which had been abandoned through lack of interest by the previous Liberal government, is the long incarceration of a Canadian man held in Bulgaria for a purported crime of relatively minor import, through political machinations. He has been held in solitary confinement, exposed to torture, had water withheld, and fed tainted food while housed in dreadfully unsanitary conditions for a white-collar crime in which he was accused of taking funds from a company he wholly owned.

Michael Kapoustin is in a medieval-type prison in Sofia, and has been there for 12 years of a 17-year sentence. A severe sentence for even the most egregious crime, let alone such a trifling one. He was left to languish, even though it was clear to the impartial observer that his arrest, trial and imprisonment represented a miscarriage of justice. In response to which the Liberal government was completely indifferent.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has personally appealed on this man's behalf, and Secretary of State Jason Kenney has energetically pursued the issue abroad. It is now on the table for consideration by the Council of Europe which is set to begin a mediation process which could pressure Bulgaria into releasing Mr. Kapoustin back to Canada and to his family.

This man has obviously already suffered far too greatly for the commission of a crime so relatively trivial that it begs for an answer. Which answer might conceivably be found in the suspicion that during his business dealings in the country too much had been revealed of state corruption, failing to endear him to the country's political elite whose course of action was to provide eternal detention as a reward for inconvenience.