The open letter to Minister of Justice and Attorney General Arif Virani, dated Sept. 3, also calls on the government to adopt all the recommendations contained in a June 2023 report prepared by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights (JUST) called Reforming Canada’s Extradition System.
“In particular,” it says, “the disclosure of exculpatory evidence must be compulsory (JUST’s Recommendation 11). The non-disclosure of exculpatory evidence during the extradition hearing was central to Dr. Diab’s committal for extradition in 2014.”
In a Sept. 5 statement announcing the open letter, an organization calling itself the Hassan Diab Support Committee criticized the federal government’s response to a petition presented to Parliament in June signed by more than 3,500 Canadians calling for a formal declaration that “Canada will neither accept nor agree to any second request from the French government for the extradition of Dr. Hassan Diab.”
In its response, according to the statement, the government said it could not confirm or deny the existence of an extradition request due to the confidentiality of state-to-state communications.
“The Government of Canada,” added the response, “emphasizes that all extradition requests that are received are examined carefully, taking into consideration the totality of the relevant circumstances, the Extradition Act, Canada’s international obligations, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”
The support committee called the government response “totally unacceptable.”
“The failure of the Canadian government to acknowledge the pain it continues to inflict on Dr. Diab and on his family is an outrage,” it added. “By hiding behind its duplicitous legalese and using the camouflage of confidentiality, Canada is evading its legal, moral, and human responsibility. What is worse, it only serves to prolong the nightmare it has created.”
According to the group’s letter to Virani, Diab was wrongfully extradited from Canada to France in 2014 for his alleged involvement in a bombing outside a Paris synagogue in 1980. The bombing killed four people and injured more than 40 others.
Diab spent more than three years in a French prison, but two French counter-terrorism investigative magistrates ultimately found no evidence to send him to trial and released him unconditionally. He returned to Canada in January 2018. However, a French prosecutor appealed his release and, on April 21, 2023, Diab was sentenced in absentia to life in prison.
The open letter is the latest effort by Diab’s supporters to put pressure on the federal government to prevent Diab’s second extradition to France.
In a 2023 interview with Law360 Canada, Dalhousie University law professor Robert Currie, whose signature is included with the most recent letter, said a second extradition request from France, if it has occurred, would be an abuse of process.
“In these circumstances, for France to come to our justice system and say, yeah, we still want you to extradite this guy, despite everything that has gone on, I say that’s an abuse of process,” he said. “Now, that’s a decision that the court would have to make, but that would be my argument.”
Currie said the French legal system has a bad reputation for problems with fingerprint evidence and issues of unsourced — and potentially torture-derived — intelligence obtained by French prosecutors.
In 2019, the federal government conducted an independent review of Diab’s 2014 extradition conducted by former deputy attorney general of Ontario Murray Segal, who concluded that, throughout the proceedings, Department of Justice employees acted at all times in accordance with the law and their professional and ethical obligations. The report also pointed to areas of potential improvement in Canada’s extradition process.
Diab and his lawyer Donald Bayne called the Segal report a “whitewash” and a “one-sided report” intended to absolve the government of any accountability.
In June 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that the government had ordered the independent review because “what happened to [Diab] never should have happened.”
The test for whether an extradition from Canada is valid under s. 7 of the Charter is found in the Supreme Court of Canada’s judgment in Canada v. Schmidt, 1987 1 S.C.R. 500.
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