Ruling shows how easy it is to abuse power
Hassan Almrei, 35, under house arrest after seven years in jail, adjusts a tracking device on his leg. Monitoring the Syrian refugee in his Mississauga townhouse is a costly process.
Another of Ottawa’s national security claims has proved bogus. For more than seven years, the federal government and its security bureaucrats insisted that alleged terrorist Hassan Almrei so threatened Canada that he had to be imprisoned without trial.
Even when Almrei was released earlier this year, he had to submit to an Orwellian form of house arrest.
Now, we find out that he was never a terrorist at all. More to the point, in quashing the security certificate that has kept the 35-year-old refugee in legal limbo for eight years, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley ruled that the government’s evidence against him was largely a confection, backed up by dubious newspaper clippings, sloppy history and unreliable evidence from informants who “had motive to concoct stories that cast Almrei in a negative light.”
Mosley’s 183-page ruling should be required reading. It lays out in painstaking detail how easy it is for national security bureaucrats and their political masters to misuse the extraordinary powers given to them.
In this case, Mosley writes, the government’s original suspicions of Almrei were justified. A self-admitted fraudster who dealt in false passports and who had spent time in the mujahideen camps of Afghanistan, he was an obvious target of suspicion after 9/11.
In that situation, writes Mosley, Almrei’s original detention in October 2001 was reasonable.
What was not reasonable, however, was the government’s insistence on skewing the evidence to keep him in jail.
In a normal court case, where the accused and his lawyer can question the Crown’s evidence, this might not have mattered.
But in security certificate cases, the government holds all the cards – presenting evidence in secret that the accused cannot see to refute.
Indeed, Almrei would probably still be in custody today had it not been for two Supreme Court decisions.
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Tags: Federal Court, Hassan Almrei, national security, Ottawa, Richard Mosley, ruling, security certificate, Supreme Court
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