Hopeful For The Future

Mohamed Harkat is ecstatic, he is smiling, he is overjoyed and overwhelmed, and he is 'hopeful for the future'.  Arrested in 2002 on a security certificate, held in prison and alternately house arrest since then on suspicion of being a sleeper agent for al-Qaeda, the federal government wishes to deport him to his native Algeria.

Mr. Harkat prefers to remain in Canada. Deportation to Algeria, he claims, would be the death of him.  On return, he insists, he would be tortured or killed.  By the Algerian government, of course, who must have it in for him.  On what grounds he has never quite clarified.  But one assumes that if Canada has security information compelling enough to regard this man as a possible threat to the country, Algeria has similar information.

Whether Algeria would then regard Mr. Harkat as a threat to his home and native land is another matter altogether, never quite publicly examined.  It seems enough for anyone coming to Canada from a Muslim-dominated country to infer that should they be returned to their country of birth through extradition procedures they would suffer dreadfully.  Calling upon Canada's humanitarian values to protect them.

And protect them we do, since the country's system of justice with its various avenues of appeal guarantee that no one is deported without exhausting all such avenues of appeal.  Which can take years and even more years to conclude.  As is the case with Mr. Harkat; he has been battling the federal government's decision to deport him for a decade, and shows no sign of surrendering his insistence that he be allowed to remain in Canada.

"It's not over, but at least one day I'm going to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  It gives me another day to breathe on this earth.  It's just a matter of time to clear my name and declare I'm innocent."

Evidently Mr. Harkat's right to a fair hearing was inexcusably compromised by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.  It habitually and routinely destroyed recordings of taped conversations, and did so with those relating to Mr. Harkat's case.  The then-internal policy, since altered, was to analyze and then prepare written summaries of such recordings.

Those classified summaries led Federal Court Judge Simon Noel to his conclusion that Harkat was an al-Qaeda agent.  Mr. Harkat's lawyers were permitted only a limited summary on which to base their defence.  "The summaries are the remnants of the destroyed originals.  They are the problem, not the solution", according to Justice Gilles Letourneau.

The case must now be reconsidered absent the summarized conversations that had implicated Mr. Harkat in relationships with a key al-Qaeda figure, Ahmed Said Khadr, among others.  Mr. Harkat arrived in Canada from Pakistan where he had lived for five years after leaving Algeria.  In Pakistan he operated a guest house for a Saudi-born terrorist, maintaining links to an Islamic extremist group in Egypt.

This information is now to be seen, evidently, closer to the realm of informed speculation than reliable evidence, in the absence of the summary which has been stripped of its relevance, thanks to the Court of Appeal decision.  And it is highly likely that an entirely new trial will be embarked upon. 

Mr. Harkat's lawyers will now be able to benefit on his behalf hugely in the absence of the summary as evidence, along with two sources in the case whose evidence is seen to have been tainted as possibly false. 

"I'm hopeful for the future.  I would like to have children like anybody else, and live a normal life", enthused Mr. Harkat.