Support Abousfian Abdelrazik as Canadian Complicity in Torture Goes on Trial

These breaches of the Plaintiff’s fundamental human rights were flagrant, extreme and continuous over a period of six years. Most egregiously, many senior Canadian officials were fully aware that Canada could have ended the Plaintiff’s cruel and unjust ordeal at any moment by simply securing a flight home to Montreal. In this action, he seeks redress and compensation that vindicates his Charter rights and is proportionate to the unprecedented seriousness of this wrongful state conduct.” (from his lawsuit)

Canada has a loathsome history of rendering Muslim citizens to torture abroad and being complicit in their torture. The case of Abousfian Abdlerazik is the first time such a case is scheduled for a trial.

In May 2009, 225 people defied Canadian law and purchased an airline ticket for Abousfian Abdelrazik. He had been tortured in Sudan with Canadian complicity. He was prevented from coming home by Ottawa because of CSIS lies about state security. CSIS had told Abdelrazik "Sudan will be your Guantanamo." Ottawa issued a warning: anyone providing financial support to Abdelrazik risked prosecution and 10 years imprisonment.

As Abdelrazik occupied a cot at the Canadian embassy for over a year, groups like Project Fly Home (with so much loving labour from Mary Foster and Jo Wood) and Stop Canadian Involvement in Torture worked to bring him home. Finally, when then Global Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon refused to issue travel documents(and failed to have us charged), Abdelrazik's lawyers went to Federal Court and won a repatriation order. Canadians have a right to return home.

After this combination of civic action and a court action successfully brought him home in 2009, Abdelrazik told the Globe and Mail a “ chilling account of six years of imprisonment and forced exile abroad… Mr. Abdelrazik recounted stories of interrogation and alleged torture. He told of Canadian Security and Intelligence Service agents laughingly saying "Sudan will be your Guantanamo" when he begged to be allowed to return home.

His ordeal - described as Kafkaesque by the federal court judge who ordered him repatriated - is far from ended. But the Harper government made it clear that Mr. Abdelrazik couldn't expect any support in his efforts to remove his name from the UN list.

Mr. Abdelrazik said one of the two CSIS interrogators was the same agent who questioned him at his home two days before he flew to Khartoum in March of 2003. Mr. Abdelrazik said he had called the Montreal police to get the CSIS agents to leave.

"One of them, he turned and said to me, 'You will see…' " he said.

Although CSIS denies it arranged for Mr. Abdelrazik to be imprisoned in Sudan, heavily redacted government documents say he was arrested "at our request," meaning Canada's.
After months in solitary with little food and occasional torture, Mr. Abdelrazik said one day his Sudanese jailers told him the "Canadian muhabarat want to talk to me," using the feared Arabic term for secret police.

Mr. Abdelrazik says he was taken to a room with a table laden "with cakes and fruits and juice and bottles of water," but before he could say anything, one of the CSIS agents said, "Remember I told you in Montreal that 'You will see,' … and now, you will see."

Starting Monday, October 21 in Ottawa (with viewing of the trial possible online here), Abdelrazik heads to Federal Court to begin the next phase of his 15-year battle for compensation as Canada's complicity in his torture goes on trial.