Human Rights Watch welcomed today the UN ruling that Sweden violated torture ban in the case of the kidnapping of Egyptian Islamist exile Ahmad Agiza, and his rendition to Cairo where he was tortured.
For more background on Agiza’s case please check this report I coauthored last year: Black Hole: The Fate of Islamists Rendered to Egypt.
From Xinhua…
A Canadian federal court judge ruled on Monday not to deport a man accused of being a national security threat to his native Egypt for he could be tortured there.
Judge Andrew MacKay made the ruling despite acknowledging that Mahmoud Jaballah made a series of questionable phone calls from Toronto to what were most likely terrorist cells around the world, on the day that the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed.
“A reasonable observer would find grounds to believe that he was, or is, a member of a terrorist group,” MacKay stated in his ruling.
Jaballah has been detained since 2001 under one of the Canadian federal government’s controversial security certificates, which allow authorities to detain terrorism suspects indefinitely without charge.
If Canada wants to deport Jaballah, it must find a country free of torture that will take him, the judge ruled.
The Canadian government has been arguing that, the 44-year-old father of six, is a threat to national security, for the past seven years.
He was first arrested in 1999 on allegations that he was linked to the Egyptian group Al-Jihad, which has worked in cohorts with Al-Qaeda. Months later, these accusations were trashed, but he was again arrested in 2001, and this time, held under a security certificate, after the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) said there was fresh evidence linking him to the group.
The government has also accused Jaballah of fighting alongside Muslim extremists, in wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya.
Jaballah’s legal team have refused these accusations, claiming that the information CSIS had received was unreliable.
A federal court judge, earlier this year, upheld a decision not to grant Jaballah asylum, as a person in need of protection from torture.
My friend Stephen Grey’s long-awaited book on extraordinary renditions is out.
Stephen is one of Britain’s top investigative reporters, who did, in my view, some of the best reporting pieces on the current “War on Terror.” His new book is a must read.