Before his talk yesterday, Irwin Cotler sat down with the Daily for a brief chat about legislation passed in September that changed the rules regarding who can be held in suspicion of terrorism and how they can be treated.
The Daily reported yesterday that, excepting one abstaining Massachusetts legislator, all of the state's representatives to Congress voted against the so-called detainee bill, with Senator Barney Frank (D-Mass.) calling it "bad public policy."
Cotler acknowledged that among politicians there has been a "dispute to the fact that [this bill] does what people say it does;" that is, restricting civil liberties in the interest of national security.
Nevertheless, he said that he is "concerned" about the bill because of its compromising stance toward basic legal "rules" like habeas corpus, prohibition of certain practices in detainee treatment, and the applicability in court of evidence obtained by coercion.
"The struggle against terrorism must be carried out in a principled way," he said. That principle is "the protection of human security."
Human rights and the fight against terrorism are "mutually complimentary and reinforcing," Cotler said.
"I see terrorism as an assault on the security of democracy and on collective rights like life, liberty, and security," he said. Preventing terrorism therefore represents "promotion and protection of human rights."
This advantage, however, is jeopardized when individuals and groups are "singled out" for discriminatory treatment, he said.
The United States' human rights record was tainted no more than ten days before the detainee bill was passed, when a Canadian government commission censured the U.S. for its extradition of a Canadian citizen to Syria, where he was tortured for crimes that the commission found he didn't commit.
Maher Arar was detained in the United States for eight days on terrorism charges on his way back to Canada from Tunisia and was not informed of his consular rights by U.S. authorities, according to Cotler. The United States, furthermore, did not fully inform Canadian officials of their plans for Arar before extraditing him to Syria, where he was imprisoned for four years.
Cotler, who represented Arar while he was still the Minister of Justice in Canada, said that Arar is "not just an innocent person but an innocent victim of three governments, and those are the U.S., the Syrian government, and the Canadian government."
The States "play[ed] a principle role in this narrative," he said, noting the apparent hypocrisy of sending an alleged criminal to a country that the United States consistently decries as a proponent of terrorism and a violator of human rights.
"What this shows is that we have to be very careful in a post-9/11 universe about the way we conduct anti-terrorism efforts," he said.
In this vein, the detainee bill "undermines fundamental American due process safeguards," he said.
"In the end, you have either both security and rights or you have neither," he said. "[Any anti-terrorism action] must be done in a way that comports with the rules."
-Zofia Sztykowski
