RIGHTS-CANADA: Supreme Court Bans Extradition to Countries with Death Penalty

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Feb 16 2001 (IPS) - Trinidad’s efforts to extradite one of its nationals from Canada and have him tried for murder may have been stopped in its tracks by this country’s top justices on Thursday.

“In the Canadian view of fundamental justice, capital punishment is unjust and should be stopped,” stated the Supreme Court of Canada in a unanimous decision on a separate case involving two Canadian citizens.

The court ruled that the Canadians could not be sent back to the US state of Washington to face murder charges until authorities there guarantee that they will not face the death penalty. While Canada has outlawed the practice, Trinidad and many US states sentence convicted murderers to death.

The Supreme Court said that only under “exceptional” circumstances will these foreign assurances not be required, but it did not say what such circumstances are.

Canadian lawyer Wes Wilson told Inter Press Service that the Supreme Court ruling also applies to non-Canadians such as his client, Simon Raghoonanan, now sitting in a Toronto jail. He awaits extradition to Trinidad and Tobago where he faces a charge of murdering a state witness in the high profile trial of the Dole Chadee gang.

Raghoonanan is accused in Trinidad of driving the getaway car following the group murder of Clint Huggins who also happened to be his cousin. Huggins was slated to testify against nine members of a ferocious drug gang led by Dole Chadee, all of whom were charged with the murder of a family. The men were subsequently found guilty and hanged on Jun. 5, 1999.

The Raghoonanan extradition case presented certain difficulties primarily because he was deemed extraditable based on evidence that was of a “lower standard”. Firstly there were doubts that Wilson’s client, was indeed the Simon Raghoonanan the Trinidad authorities are looking for.

The only evidence offered by the government of the southern Caribbean country at the Toronto extradition hearing was an enlarged group photo where the accused’s head is “slightly bowed” and the bottom third of his face “is not truly straightforward”, noted Justice Paul Dilks in his deliberation.

Nevertheless on Jan. 18, Dilks determined that “on the balance of probabilities” the detained man facing him in the courtroom was the same person being sought by Trinidad and that he should therefore be returned to the Caribbean country to stand trial.

The decision is being appealed on constitutional grounds. That appeal may well be moot now, since Trinidad has the death penalty.

Jeffrey House, Raghoonanan’s other lawyer noted that Canadian law did not normally permit the introduction in a trial of hearsay evidence, but that that was exactly what had happened in the hearing for his client.

That is because a 1999 extradition law allows foreign governments in extradition hearings to introduce evidence “of a lower standard” for the purposes of returning one of their nationals or even a Canadian citizen to their legal jurisdiction to face trial, states House. He says there are roughly about 50 to 60 extradition cases a year in Canada where the lower standard has been applied.

The Trinidadian government was not, for instance, required to provide either a fingerprint or a sworn affidavit by an eyewitness or official (both are required legal protections in the Canadian legal system) to properly identify Simon Raghoonanan of Toronto as the right man.

All the Trinidadian authorities had to do was to present at the extradition a summary of the evidence regarding Raghoonanan, as certified by their Attorney General or top legal official, said Bill Corbett, a senior general counsel at the Canadian Department of Justice in Ottawa. “[The certification] puts somebody’s name on the line, which wasn’t there before [in extradition requests].”

Corbett, defending the evidence provisions in the extradition act, noted that with the “internationalisation of crime” involving the drug trade, fraud and terrorism, Canada had become more flexible with regards to the types of evidence presented by countries with vastly different legal systems. (Three-quarters of the extraditions sought involve the United States).

While Trinidad’s justice system is somewhat similar to Canada’s in terms of a shared British heritage, the former differs in one major respect. Judges in the Caribbean nation are mandated to impose capital punishment for all convictions involving murder, including those who were involved peripherally, says House.

Amnesty International, which campaigns hard against capital punishment and torture around the world, had taken the position that Canada should think twice before sending Raghoonanan back to Trinidad to face a justice system where people charged with crimes punishable by death spend long periods in detention and are often unrepresented in court.

It appears with Thursday’s ruling Amnesty has got its wish.