|
My
concern arose when the refugee
list serve got a shocking personal account
from a law student at one of
the
legal clinics who had been working as a
monitor of the protests. He was
passing out
phone numbers for legal advice and the
like. He ended up detained
incommunicado
for almost 24 hours in an experience which
transformed him from a
believer in
Canadian institutions into a bitter cynic.
So I checked the web site of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association where I found impressive and persuasive testimony from its own monitors which indicated arbitrary mass detentions of whole groups of peaceful protestors and of confinement in a special facility under improper conditions. The CCLA legal council had been given the run around by police for a day trying to make contact with a detained CCLA monitor in the facility. While the Globe editorial pages remained generally supportive of police, inside pages published the experience of a Globe employee living in Lesleyville who took her family to see what was going on at the facility in her neighbourhood. The family did escape encircling police with testimony compatible with CCLA monitors. Amnesty International says some 1000 people were detained. Some were likely linked to violence and vandalism, but the evidence is that many were peacefully protesting or simply caught up while trying to carry on normal daily business. It seems journalists and others attempting to document the protests and the police response were targeted. Amnesty says the scale of arrests was unprecedented in Canada. Amnesty wanted to use the G8 and G20 summits to promote its view that human rights must be at the heart of the global fight against poverty. More generally, governments should be held accountable to the UN Millennium Development Goals they adopted in 2000, but which they are ignoring. Instead of voicing such concerns, the voices of thousands of decent caring Canadians were silenced or ignored and the headlines dominated by images of burning police cars and broken windows. This kind of police activity kills rather than upholds rights important for a democracy - rights of peaceful assembly, association and expression. A democracy should nurture the freedom of caring citizens to express their concerns without fear of anarchist mobs or police attacks. A judgment on an earlier Canadian protest requires people be able to get their message across to the governments meeting. That didn’t happen in Toronto. Unfortunately, police behaviour under stress has previously fallen short in Canada. The Human Rights Committee examined Canada in 1990 and its Concluding Observations made reference to police excesses in quelling a riot in a woman’s prison. Then in 1999, the Concluding observations note at paragraph 12: “The Committee is deeply concerned that the State party so far has failed to hold a thorough public inquiry into the death of an aboriginal activist who was shot dead by provincial police during a peaceful demonstration regarding land claims in September 1995, in Ipperwash. The Committee strongly urges the State party to establish a public inquiry into all aspects of this matter, including the role and responsibility of public officials.” Incidentally, there was subsequently a public inquiry -what is now requested for the G20 activities. Then again in 2006, at paragraph 20, the HRC saya: “The Committee is concerned about information that the police, in particular in Montreal, have resorted to large-scale arrests of demonstrators. It notes the State party’s responses that none of the arrests in Montreal have been arbitrary since they were conducted on a legal basis. The Committee, however, recalls that arbitrary detention can also occur when the deprivation of liberty results from the exercise of the rights or freedoms guaranteed by the Covenant ...” The HRC goes on to advise Canada that arrests are arbitrary, irrespective of Canadian law, if arrests result from the expression of the treaty human rights and freedoms which Canada agreed to follow. The HRC mentions freedom of expression and of association . In other words, arbitrary detention is an arrest from peaceful protest. Suppose
NGOs like Amnesty and the Canadian
Civil Liberties Association succeed in
getting an inquiry again, will
anything
really change this time? Concern and
advice was given by the UN Human
Rights Committee
through Reports in 1990, 1999, 2006 about
police behaviour, about
arbitrary
detention and about peaceful public
protest. Canadian judges have
offered
similar concerns and advice. This time it
appears the government and the police
planned to repeat the arbitrary
detention
which the HRC found contrary to Canada’s
international human rights
treaty
obligations in its 2006 Report. Unless some new approach is proposed which gets to the root of the persistent problem of police excesses and makes some fundamental changes to the way police operate, the record suggests we are stuck with police forces which always overreact in stressful circumstances. They have caused death. They have caused arbitrary detention. Now they have cast a cloud of danger for those considering expressing their rights to peaceful assembly and protest. TOP Click:  |