Significant Impediments

"It is a significant impediment if you can't fly. It brings economic loss, a loss of dignity. It hurts your enjoyment of life.  The issue is about secrecy, about the accuracy of the information and the due process to be able to correct the information if it is inaccurate. It is not an unsympathetic case. There is a question of access to justice if their rights are impugned."
Lawyer Nathalie des Rosiers, general counsel, Canadian Civil Liberties Association

Ms. Des Rosiers was defending the first man known to have been placed on Canada's no-fly list, Hani Al Telbani, an engineering student at Concordia University.  In her opinion Mr. Al Telbani was involved in an "important constitutional" enterprise.  Seeking to have his legal expenses in fighting to have his name removed from the no-fly list, paid for by the Canadian government. 

Mr. Al Telbani has been a permanent resident of Canada since 2004.  In seeking to board a flight at Montreal's Trudeau airport in 2008 to travel to Saudi Arabia where his parents live, the Palestinian-born young man was denied flight entry.  As explanation he was made privy to a copy of an emergency direction from the Minister of Transport declaring that he "posed an immediate threat to aviation security".

This was an event that brought accusations of racial profiling, pointing to the negative impact on civil liberties, along with the effect of public safety and national security, with its inevitable legal challenges.  Mr. Al Telbani denies that he is a threat to safety and security, claiming that he has been unjustly associated with terrorism by the Government of Canada.

Although he has declared his innocence and his lawyer insists that his inclusion on a no-fly list is an infringement of his rights, a Transport Canada intelligence officer was responsible for issuing the emergency direction to disallow Mr. Al Telbani from boarding the flight to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2008.  Additional information was disallowed by the government as being "sensitive" for security reasons.

Despite which a legal challenge brought forward by Macleans' magazine had the result of revealing that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service tracked this man as the administrator of a password-protected Internet forum (no longer in use) frequented by militant Islamists, and utilized by al-Qaeda to circulate messages from Osama bin Laden.  Deemed to be quite incriminating, obviously.

Mr. Al Telbani turned to the Federal Court of Appeal to overturn a ruling by a lower court that denied his request for legal funding by the government.  His intention was to spare his family the expense of paying for his legal representation in court.  A panel of three judges upheld the original ruling, finding that his case related to his personal interests and not of public importance.

Quite the trade-off; Mr. Al Telbani is inconvenienced by a Transport Canada no-fly list, creating an impediment to his free movement as a result of his suspected, but denied involvement in violent jihad, whereas the Canadian public is threatened by the presence of a suspected terrorist sympathizer if not an outright terrorist in our midst.

Who seeks the law to overturn a judgement that has the potential to diminish the quality of his life.  On the other hand, why not employ the simple expedient of permitting the man to fly to Saudi Arabia to rejoin his family there and deny him re-entrance to Canada - which seems a far better settlement of the situation than what currently pertains.