Monday, April 13, 2009

The continuing trials of Abdelrazik as Josef K

The Canadian government's latest new reason for barring Abdelrazik's passage home :
"In a federal-court filing, the government says its hands are tied and that neither Mr. Abdelrazik's Charter right as a citizen to enter Canada nor the UN's specific travel-ban exemption permitting those on its terrorist blacklist to return home requires it let him fly back to his family in Montreal.

It says the UN travel ban "prohibits other states" from allowing Mr. Abdelrazik or anyone else on what's called the 1267 list of al-Qaeda suspects "to enter into and travel through their territories which includes land, airspace and territorial waters."

However :

"Only two days before Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon rescinded the government's written promise to issue Mr. Abdelrazik a travel document to fly home, another person on the 1267 blacklist flew from London to Nairobi after the British government received a routine exemption from the UN Security Council 1267 Committee.

Mr. Ciise's flight across Europe and Africa would have transited the airspace of as many as a dozen countries, depending on the weather and the routing. None of them was required to approve his travel plans.

The Harper government has never applied for a travel-ban exemption for Mr. Abdelrazik."



Four days ago CBC's The Current did a very good short history of Abdelrazik's plight, comparing his situation to that of Josef K in Kafka's The Trial. Listen to it here, starting at the two minute mark : Abdelrazik/Kafka Doc.

H/T POGGE
.

3 comments:

Q said...

Kafka may have been prescient but he couldn't have foreseen the paranoid buffoonery of the neocon sycophant Harper.

Paul said...

Stunning.

And, Q, I wish Harper was driven by paranoia. I would somehow find that less frustrating. He is likely just driven by obstinacy, which is utterly worse. Shameful, really.

Alison said...

I think he's driven by what he probably sees as realpolitik - the necessity of good relations with the US at any price.

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