RIGHTS-CANADA: Anti-Terror Laws Sow Fear in Muslim Communities

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Feb 25 2005 (IPS) - Passed in the aftermath of the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act is being used to intimidate citizens and immigrants of Muslim origin through racial profiling conducted by federal police, activists charge.

The Act, which amends 12 federal laws, amounts to an expansion of investigative powers for Canada’s national policing and security agencies.

Although its anti-terror provisions have not technically been invoked, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are using their expanded powers to threaten to detain people without charge or force them to give testimony, says Raja Khouri, a policy advisor and former president of the Canadian Arab Federation.

Khouri told IPS that members of the Arab community had been told: "I can lock you up; I don’t need a reason" by RCMP officers.

Earlier this month, Anne McLellan, the Canadian minister of public safety, told a Senate committee that the measures to crack down on terrorist groups under the Anti-Terrorism Act strike a "right balance" between protecting national security and preserving civil liberties.

McLellan denied that any of Canada’s law enforcement officers, national security investigators, prison officers or border guards had singled out any minorities in their investigations. "That would be a firing offence," she said.

However, Senator Mobina Jaffer – like McLellan, a member of the ruling Liberal party – countered that Canadian police and security officials do "racially profile."

"I have documents that show it. I would not say a minister is lying. I would say she is mistaken. If your name is a Muslim name, Mohammed or Jaffer, you are stopped. I have been stopped. My family has been stopped for no reason, except for our name," she said.

"So the problem, the challenge we have is that the law should be the same for everybody."

Recent court decisions have confirmed the police use of racial profiling in Canada, says Queen’s University law professor Don Stuart. He noted that in the application of drug laws against black people, "judges for years have denied the use of this phenomenon, but now in the last two, they are recognising it."

Stuart also believes that the definition of terrorism under the Anti-Terrorism Act is "too broad."

Khouri agrees, pointing to a provision in the federal legislation that defines terrorism as violence done for political, religious or ideological purposes.

"Give this kind of legislation to people in law enforcement and they are going to start looking first of all at people’s beliefs, religious or otherwise, and using these beliefs as indicators of complicity in terrorism," she said.

"We have had the RCMP go into people’s homes and ask them questions like ‘how often do you pray?’, ‘how often do you go to the mosque?’".

Khouri charges that Canadian law enforcement officers have demonstrated little understanding of other cultures and religions in the "stupid or offensive questions" they pose to Canadian Muslims in their homes, or to their neighbours and employers.

Some of the targets of the questioning are recent immigrants, adds Khouri, who "don’t want to report these things to us. People are very afraid; they don’t want to be associated with security threats. They don’t want to be seen as complaining about the police, so they don’t get into further trouble."

The situation reminds historian Reg Whittaker of the anti-communist witch-hunts in the United States in the 1950s.

While Canada did not engage in the widespread abuse of civil liberties that occurred south of its border and could "smugly" congratulate itself on avoiding U.S. excesses, quieter but similar forms of harassment did occur "behind closed doors," says Whittaker in a paper he wrote for the Canadian department of justice.

Critics of the current Anti-Terrorism Act are hoping that reviews being conducted by the Senate and a House of Commons subcommittee will look at how Canada has used secretive security certificates through separate immigration and refugee legislation to detain and deport five immigrants of Muslim. (So far, all have remained in Canada because of legal challenges.)

Canada’s Justice Minister Irwin Cotler said recently that the British use of house arrest and other personal restrictions for suspected terrorists might be copied in Canada, after a Montreal judge freed a young man of Moroccan origin who had been for detained 21 months and slated for deportation on security grounds.

Originally born in South Africa, Stuart says that the Canadian preventive detention provisions remind him of similar measures in his home country when racial discrimination was the official policy.

"Just because there is a suspicion that they might be involved in something, that is no reason to lock people up. That is what the apartheid regime was all about," Stuart told IPS.

Rex Brynen, a McGill University political science professor, warned the Canadian department of justice a year ago of the danger of needlessly alienating members of certain minority communities from Canadian society at large, and making them prey to extremist groups.

"Exclusionary or discriminatory security measures targeted against particular transnational ethnic communities are at a grave risk of failure or even backfiring," he said.

However, Muslims in Canada still believe in their country and are focused on mobilising during and after elections against politicians who support draconian legal means to fight terrorism, says Khouri.