Canada and Saudi Arabia : Contrasting Tales

"In order for this guy to leave Canada without a passport, it had to be facilitated by the Saudi government, or some government, and there's no reason to believe that any other government would put themselves in this position."
"It's intriguing to me as to why the Saudi government would put up bail and then facilitate his departure from Canada before he had an opportunity to complete the criminal process. This is a foreign government interfering with the criminal process."
Veteran immigration lawyer, Lee Cohen, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Mohammed Zuraibi Alzoabi had $37,500 of his bail posted by the Saudi Arabian embassy last year in relation to the alleged sexual assault, assault and forcible confinement of the woman between Aug. 1, 2015, and March 26, 2017 in Cape Breton.Facebook

A Saudi man charged with sexually assaulting a Cape Breton woman the 28-year-old man is no longer in Canada after having bail in the sum of $37,500 posted for him by the Saudi Arabian embassy last year. Charged with sexual assault, assault and forcible confinement of the woman -- whose name is protected -- between August 2015 and March 2017, the province's prosecution service says Mohammed Zaraibi Alzoabi has absconded. The bail funding was duly forfeited when the man failed to appear in court last Monday.

This Saudi national also faces separate charges of dangerous driving and assault with a car in an incident involving a Cape Breton man that occurred in December of 2015. According to a court document the sheriff attempted on December 8 to track the man down. David Iannetti, his lawyer informed the sheriff that Alzoabi "fled the country some time ago", despite that police had seized his passport. Without a passport it should be impossible to leave the country, yet the impossible occurred, but not without suspicion.

The most conceivable way open to Alzoabi enabling him to leave the country without his passport in hand would logically be if the Saudi embassy saw fit to issue him with travel documents, since airlines boarding passengers without government-issued permission or a passport face heavy fines. The Saudi embassy appears disinterested in committing itself to anything resembling an explanation but it would seem that this kind of occurrence is not unique to Canada, in the Kingdom's interference in the laws of other countries.

A recent report in the Oregonian newspaper detailed last year's flight of Abdulrahman Sameer Noorah, a community college student in Portland, Oregon who jumped bail in the hit-and-run death of a 15-year-old Portland girl, in an apparent similarity to the illegal exit of Alzoabi from Canada evading trial and subsequent penalty for serious criminal acts. In the Oregon case, the malefactor was monitored with a GPS bracelet which had been cut to enable Noorah to leave the U.S. weeks before his trial date.

That same Oregonian reported the results of its own investigation in revealing at least five other criminal cases involving Saudi nationals who managed to disappear before facing trial or completing a state jail sentence. For all the good it will do, Cape Breton Regional Police issued a warrant for Alzoabi's arrest for failing to appear for his trial. Saudi males, it appears, have the complete protection of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia irrespective of any criminal acts they may be involved in abroad.

Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, 18, pauses as she addresses the media during a press conference in Toronto, Canada, on January 15, 2019.

Cole Burston/AFP/Getty Images

In contrast, Canada responded to a social media campaign launched by a female Saudi teen who managed to separate herself from her family while on a holiday in Kuwait when she flew to Bangkok, Thailand, and from there appealed to the international community through Twitter for help in establishing herself elsewhere where she might live a 'normal' life far from Saudi Arabia's male guardianship social-political culture victimizing its female citizens. Now, 18-year-old Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, rejecting Islam, is prepared to make a new life for herself as a self-aware woman under her own agency.

Mohammed Zuraibi Alzoabi had $37,500 of his bail posted by the Saudi Arabian embassy last year in relation to the alleged sexual assault.  (David Kawai / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Modernizing Egypt, Slowly Empowering Egyptian Women

"Why cannot we, as a state concerned with the safeguarding of society ... issue a law that only legalizes divorce when done in the presence of a Maazoun [cleric authorized by government to officiate marriage and divorce] so we can give the couple a chance to reconsider?"
"It cannot be just a word that is casually uttered. [Children would be protected under a proposed law, preventing 'inappropriate behaviour'."
Egyptian President Abdel Fatah el-Sissi

Egyptian President Fatah el-Sissi, AP

President el-Sissi, with much on his agenda, not the least of which is Egypt's economy, its domestic crime rate, sectarian hostilities, the pressures of Islamists loyal to the now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, and the violent attacks taking place in the Sinai by Salafist Bedouin, Islamic State and el-Qaeda militias and Brotherhood-linked Hamas on Egyptian police and military, still obviously uses his nimble brain to ruminate on how Egyptian society could benefit by setting aside some of the Islamist-inspired cultural traditions such as a man's prerogative to end a marriage simply by stating "I divorce you" three times in succession. 

As a devout Muslim himself, President el-Sissi is aware of creeping fundamentalist Islamism and the violence that ensues, and has expressed his frustration in the past over ancient Islamic scripture being revived that reflects the mores of its medieval past, rather than moving forward into the 21st Century. In particular, he has spoken of Islamic exceptionalism and jihad, rejecting both as inappropriate for a world religion and deploring the existence of terrorist groups patterning themselves on the Islam of its early years of bloody conquest.

Now he has addressed himself to his nation's high divorce rate. He feels that legislation that would outlaw the verbally valid divorce in Sharia law -- to make it mandatory for Muslim men and their spouses to seek out alternatives to spur-of-the-moment sundering of a marriage contract -- would represent a step forward. President el-Sissi spoke recently during a televised address of his alarm on hearing from the head of the nation's Statistics Bureau that some 40 percent of Egypt's annual 900,000 marriages last a mere five years.

Legislation was required -- he suggested to the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, the international authority of the Muslim world and of religious learning and jurisprudence -- that would de-legalize the too-simple social convention of three-times-repeated "I divorce you", which could be initiated only by a man. Divorce should ideally be legal only when announced in the presence of an officially authorized cleric, he sressed. The idea being to avert emotional arguments between husband and wife, descending to a splintering of the marriage.



The old verbal protocol, announcing the dissolution of a marriage, satisfies the traditional patriarchy in Egypt which considers that kind of decision the prerogative of the male. President el-Sissi's foray into reforming such outdated cultural traditions is not popularly embraced by either conservative militants or fundamentalist clerics. President el-Sissi understands these dynamics well, that he requires the cooperation of Al Azhar's grand imam, sheik Ahmed al-Tayeb, for success in overturning the male-centric privilege.

But the Egyptian president is firm in his belief that Islam is badly in need of a new image, and to do so would require expunging the interpretation of the radical readings of the Koran, popularized by militant groups such as the Islamic State. "It's a harsh war and the entire world knows that we are fighting it alone", said President el-Sissi in contradiction of pro-government media asserting that the militants were on the verge of destruction, successfully challenged by the Egyptian military.

The President's views on sexual harassment in Egyptian society as a chronic social ill, has him speaking forcefully in condemning the practise. He guided his 596 seat parliament last year on producing tougher penalties for female genital mutilation, where amendments to punish perpetrators with up to 15 years in prison should a child die as a result of the medieval practise, and up to seven years for performing the procedure.

Egypt is well served under his tutelage and guidance.

Uncompromising "Scholarly" Oral Tradition?

"Although contributions to scholarship necessarily involve a combination of quality and quantity, generally we would expect to see five to six peer-reviewed, significant publications by the time you seek tenure."
Dean, Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia

"[There is] nothing about indigeneity that prevents an indigenous person from having the capability of meeting the  university's requirements."
"[Lorna June McCue] had not even commenced to meet [the standard]."
UBC lawyers

"I was doing teaching with my community -- they should value the teaching I am doing with my community."
"This is work that does not fit conveniently into an academic timetable, but it is vital."
Former law professor Lorna June McCue

Jenelle Schneider/Postmedia News  Lorna June McCue has alleged that peer-reviewed research is contrary to indigenous oral traditions and that UBC’s research standard effectively discriminated against her “race, colour, ancestry, place of origin … and sex.”

 

Exceptionalism, that is how people who feel entitled by virtue of their special place in society, should be viewed and treated; the general imposition of expectations that hold true for everyone else should be waived for them because they are so special. Former professor of law at University of British Columbia, a hereditary chief with the Ned'u'ten people of the Lake Babine First Nation in British Columbia, she acted as the director of First Nations Legal Studies at UBC.

She is now making representation to a provincial human rights tribunal that she was denied tenure and dismissed when, in her opinion, after 11 years at the university she had proven herself ready to be elevated to permanent staff. That this did not occur was not her fault, she contends, since she produced all that was required of her as an aboriginal with her own traditions, but the fault of the university which insisted on imposing on her "significant compromise" away from First Nations' oral tradition which she felt should replace the scholarship evidence the university required of her.

All professorial staff at the university are advised that to be considered for tenure they are expected to publish at least up to five and if possible more, academic papers in their field of study for publication in a respected scholarly peer-review journal. The matter was addressed to Ms. McCue directly. She insisted her indigenous oral tradition should have superseded the university's requirements. She had, she insisted, attended conferences, made submissions to UN bodies and contributed chapters in non-peer-reviewed publications.

The university, she claims, forces indigenous scholars to compromise their research through insisting it be contained in non-oral forms. "The essence of her position is that UBC's stance forces her, as an indigenous scholar, to be someone she is not", a tribunal document stated in encapsulating the petition by Ms. McCue. It was pointed out that this person simply kept ignoring warnings that she must generate peer-reviewed research if she were to expect tenure, as other indigenous scholars at the university had done themselves.

Certainly, the university went out of its way to encourage Ms. McCue to exert herself as required.
She was given eight months free of teaching to enable her to place her focus solely on producing research papers for publication. In that period her sole publication was an eight-page article that appeared as a chapter in a non-peer-reviewed work. Tribunal documents took note of this discrepancy: "[UBC] does not and need not weigh unknown, unreported and unpublished work as heavily as peer-reviewed publications."

This indigenous professor doesn't appear to have been someone who earned respect and admiration among the students she taught. Many noted she seemed to them to be unprepared, unschooled and unhelpful. She noted in her CV that as an academic she has been "successful in collaborating with legal professionals that work with indigenous peoples". That, and a paid-up plane ticket can get you to Disneyland.