Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. In this episode, Lorentzism talks with Alex Neve about the recent conviction in absentia of Canadian academic Hassan Diab.
Speaker: Hassan Diab, an Ottawa academic, has been entangled in a 15 -year legal battle against claims he is a terrorist. Last week, the Assai's court in Paris found Dr. Diab guilty of perpetrating a 1980 bomb attack outside a synagogue in Paris. In a new trial, following a long process that has been often described as Kafkaesque, the French court has sentenced the Ottawa academic to life in prison.
Speaker: Last month Amnesty International called on the French public prosecutor for anti -terrorism to drop the groundless charges against Dr. Hassan Diab. They point out that both the Canadian and French justice systems have already found there to be a lack of credible evidence. Alex Neave is a senior fellow in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, and he joins me now. Hello Alex, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker: Thanks for the opportunity, Lorraine.
Speaker: I think that's a really important point to remind ourselves that this is not the first time that the French justice system has investigated and come to conclusions about Hassan Diab's case. He was held in a maximum security prison in Paris, most of the time in solitary confinement for over three years between 2014 and 2018.
Speaker: after his extradition from Canada. And during that time, two investigative judges with the French legal system, I think people have to remember that the French legal system when it comes to criminal matters is quite different from what we have in Canada. And judges do play, at the outset, play this very active role in investigating the case.
Speaker: And over the span of three years, they investigated it thoroughly, both with respect to any incriminating evidence that points to guilt, but also exculpatory evidence that backs up an alibi or points to him being not guilty.
Speaker: And both of those went entirely in Hassan Diab's favor, incriminating evidence which has largely turned around handwriting analysis reports, completely collapsed under their watch. And they dug into evidence associated with Dr. Diab's long claim that he wasn't even in Paris at the time of the bombing, that he was
Speaker: writing his university exams in Lebanon and therefore could not have carried out this horrific crime. They actually traveled to Lebanon, they got access to university records, they interviewed a number of eyewitnesses who were with Dr. Diab at that time, and they confirmed his alibi evidence. So that's where things stood in 2018, and it's worth noting that even though that's now five years ago,
Speaker: That evidentiary landscape hasn't changed. There's no new incriminating evidence that has come to light. And the exculpatory evidence, that alibi evidence, remains as it is. But nonetheless, we had the deeply unfair and unsound conviction recently.
Speaker: Now, over on this side of the ocean, Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Moranger, who presided over Dr. Diab's extradition hearing, wrote that France had presented a weak case and the prospects of conviction in the context of a FAIR trial seems unlikely. So let's talk about that current trial that just happened. Was it fair?
Speaker: It wasn't fair, sadly. And I think that probably comes as a bit of a surprise to a lot of Canadians and a lot of listeners might find that hard to accept. We're talking about France after all. This is not a trial that happened in North Korea or Belarus. France is obviously a healthy and vibrant democracy with a strong legal system, a longstanding commitment to the rule of law.
Speaker: But I think it's important to remind ourselves that we know in Canada, in the United States and certainly in France and many other democratic countries with strong legal systems, unfair trials nonetheless still happen. Wrongful convictions nonetheless happen because other considerations carry the day. There's other influences that sadly take a precedence over the fair trial considerations. And that is what has happened in this instance.
Speaker: Tell us what we heard from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2018 when Diab was extradited back to Canada and Prime Minister Trudeau's response this week. Well, I think we need to remind ourselves that in 2018, I think Canadians were quite shocked to hear about what had happened to Dr. Diab. While his case had received a reasonable amount of media and public attention over the many years when he was fighting his extradition, it certainly wasn't a high profile case.
Speaker: But at that point, when he was finally released after more than three years of maximum security, largely solitary confinement imprisonment, released because those two judges said, we've looked into this and there's not even enough evidence to launch a trial, let alone to have a conviction here.
Speaker: I think people were stunned. How could it have been that Canada's extradition system, for instance, had delivered someone up to that sort of fate, not being charged, three years of languishing in prison without charges being brought forward. And clearly at the end of the day, there being no evidence to back it up.
Speaker: And I think Prime Minister Trudeau's comments reflected those same concerns that Canadians were feeling that this was stunning. It was deeply troubling that it had happened, including Canada's role, because Canada was no passive observer here. Canada, our courts, our Minister of Justice at the time, had both made a decision that this was a legitimate extradition and should go ahead.
Speaker: And I think the prime minister's comments reflected the fact that that's not OK. That can't simply be how we view his case. It shouldn't have happened because it was so profoundly unjust. And when we know that something shouldn't have happened because it's profoundly unjust, the next piece of that has to be it cannot happen again. And that's exactly what the prime minister reflected in those comments in 2018. And his comments this past week.
Speaker: So after the conviction, and there was considerable media coverage, and a lot of the coverage did pick up on the fact that many observers and commentators were noting that there were deep concerns about the soundness of the conviction, the wrongfulness of the conviction.
Speaker: And so when pressed on that, he was careful. He didn't take a definitive position on the case one way or the other. He not surprisingly noted that the next step for Canada will be to see how France proceeds. Is there, for instance, a second extradition request? What does that look like? But I think it was really notable that he went on to highlight that at the end of the day,
Speaker: the government will be committed to ensuring that the rights of Canadians are upheld, respected and protected. And so I think that gives us some degree of confidence that he's indicating that there still is concern within the government about how Dr. Diab has been treated.
Speaker: Now, with the extradition request likely to come from France, we don't know if it will, but they may ask for the extradition of Dr. Diab back to France. He would be facing his life sentence. What should Canada do?
Speaker: It's really easy. Canada should just say no. And more importantly, Canada should just say no at the outset because there's two ways in which this could proceed. One is the extradition request comes. It would come to the Minister of Justice, David Lamenti, and he could decide to initiate the extradition process once again. That comes through a document known as
Speaker: authority to proceed and that would send the case off to the courts again.
Speaker: There would be no doubt, once again, a lengthy and protracted extradition hearing in the courts. Then if the courts uphold the extradition request, there's a second step where it comes back to the minister again, who makes what's known as a surrender decision. And then if Dr. Diab wanted to, which I'm sure he would, he could then launch an appeal of those two proceedings, which would go to a provincial, the Ontario Court of Appeal.
Speaker: All of that is several years of, once again, Dr. Diab being completely ensnared in, and I'll use the word that has been used so often here, Kafkaesque proceedings.
Speaker: And even at the end of the day, if the court said no, if the appeal court said no, and he is vindicated, that's nonetheless a lot to have been put through on the tail end of 15 years of already being trapped in those kinds of proceedings. So the alternative option, a much better one, is that right at the outset, the minister looks at the request from the French government, takes into account the very problematic history
Speaker: the clear evidence that this is an unsound and wrongful conviction and declines to issue that authority to proceed. In other words, doesn't even allow it to go forward as an extradition process. That's totally permissible under the Extradition Act and it would be absolutely the just and proper thing to do here.
Speaker: If we look back to France, how can we make sense of what's driving this miscarriage of justice, convicting Diab in the case of a horrific bombing 43 years ago at the Paris synagogue?
Speaker: Well, I think it's, as you've noticed, this was a horrific bombing. In 1980, when this occurred, it was devastating and it was clearly intended to be as absolutely cruel and devastating as possible. A bomb that goes off outside a synagogue at the time when it is packed with worshippers. There were something like 300 worshippers in the synagogue.
Speaker: at that time, much has been made of the fact that it went off a little sooner than maximum impact because the service was slightly delayed. And if the service hadn't been delayed, there would have been many other worshippers out in the street at the time, and the number of people killed would have been much, much higher. As it was, four people were killed.
Speaker: Over 40 people were injured. It was, and I think remains, the most heinous act of anti -Semitic violence in France since World War II. There's huge pressure for there to be a conviction for what was an absolutely heinous crime.
Speaker: And the fact that here we are more than 42 years later and all we have is a sham conviction of a scapegoat is a real indictment of the French justice system. And there is therefore considerable pressure within the French justice system to ensure that there is a conviction. One almost has a feeling like it didn't really matter who
Speaker: what's going to be convicted at this point of time. There needed to be closure. There needed to be a sense of accountability. And certainly the reports back from the three and a half week trial that has just happened is that that was the overriding mood and consideration in the trial. Not so much an in -depth grappling with whether this particular man truly is guilty or not, but this overriding
Speaker: pressure for this to be wrapped up for there to be a conviction and that sadly that is what has carried the day. Alex, are there things that need to change with respect to our extradition laws in hindsight of this case?
Speaker: As Antioch's case has spotlighted, perhaps like no other case in recent years, the many weaknesses and deficiencies in the extradition act. The extradition act was last updated significantly so in 1999. So it hasn't been revised and updated in a long time. The world has changed a lot since 1999. Geopolitics have changed. The way justice systems operate has changed. It's
Speaker: Clearly is time for it to be updated and the fact that an experience like Hassan Diab's has come along has really demonstrated the degree to which that act
Speaker: is dramatically weighted in the favor of states seeking extradition and offers very little in terms of safeguards to ensure that the rights of individuals are being properly respected and upheld, that there is actually a meaningful opportunity for an individual to defend themselves in an extradition proceeding.
Speaker: Fortunately, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights is looking at that very question right now. They've taken up a study of the extradition act with that very question of reform in mind. There were hearings, I and a number of others appeared before the committee in February, and we're now awaiting
Speaker: It's anticipated that there will be a report from the committee before the summer break, and hopefully we'll see that some of the many recommendations that were made, much of which picked up on a very thoughtful document known as the Halifax Proposals, which came out of a colloquium led by Halifax legal academic Robert Curry, who's really one of the leading
Speaker: legal academics in the country when it comes to extradition issues. So there's some very thoughtful, pragmatic, concrete recommendations in front of the committee. And we all hope that we'll see that reflected in their report. How can people act right now to support Hassan Diab?
Speaker: There certainly is a public campaign, an online petition that is hosted by an organization known as the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, which is calling on the Canadian government to say no in the eventuality that there is a further extradition request.
Speaker: People can get access to that by going to their website, which is iclmg .ca. That would probably be the most immediate way to do so. Beyond that, if people have the opportunity to be in touch with their own MP to make it clear that this is a case of concern to them, try to have a meeting with your MP, certainly write your own personal letter to your MP.
Speaker: going on the record that your hope and your expectation is that Canada is going to be prepared, is going to find the backbone to say no to France if this request does come in. Thank you so much for joining me this morning, Alec. It's a really important story and I'm glad you joined us. Thanks so much for the opportunity.
Speaker: I've been speaking with Alex Neave. Alex is a senior fellow in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. And you can find tools to support calls and letters to the Prime Minister at justiceforhasandab .org. You can find the petition at ICLMG .ca. I'm Lorraine Chisholm.
Speaker: The Red Eye Collective is based in Vancouver. You can check us out at coopradio .org slash redeye.
