Canada’s next justice minister must defend Hassan Diab’s rights*

The federal election is over and not much has changed. We now await word as to who will be appointed to which ministerial roles. We will be keeping an eye to see who takes up the important position of Minister of Justice and Attorney General and what priorities are included in their mandate letter.

And we have urgent advice to the Prime Minister as he drafts that crucial mandate letter. Whether David Lametti continues as Minister or the Prime Minister chooses someone new, it is vital that resolving the case of Hassan Diab, and pursuing rights-based extradition reform in Canada feature prominently among the issues they will take up. That need for reform is certainly timely in the wake of the Meng Wenzhou extradition drama.

Hassan Diab’s nightmare of injustice is well known.  Dr. Diab, a Canadian citizen and academic at Carleton University, was extradited to France on accusations he was responsible for a horrific 1980 terrorist bombing outside a synagogue in Paris that killed four people and badly injured dozens more. The extradition, on evidence so weak that the presiding judge noted it would not substantiate laying criminal charges in Ontario, went ahead in late 2014 after 6 years of protracted legal proceedings in Canadian courts.  It spotlighted how weak the protections against injustice are in Canadian extradition law.

Hassan Diab then spent three years in detention without trial in France, held in cruel conditions of solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison. UN human rights experts have concluded that prolonged solitary confinement of that nature takes such a toll that it constitutes torture.   

Investigations by French judges assigned to Dr. Diab’s case decimated the flimsy evidence, primarily handwriting analysis, that had been relied upon to justify extradition. To the contrary, judges found strong evidence corroborating Dr. Diab’s claim that he had been in Lebanon sitting his university exams at the time of the bombing. They eventually ordered that the case against him be dropped.

Dr. Diab returned home to his wife and children in Canada in January 2018. That should have been the end of the matter.  But French authorities appealed the dismissal of the charges and in two stunning judgements earlier this year, the Appeal Court and Supreme Court ruled that the case should be reinstated and Dr. Diab should stand trial.

Throughout the three years that the appeal was pending, the evidence against him continued to collapse to the point that there is not one shred of credible proof that substantiates the accusation that Hassan Diab was involved in this horrific crime.  But the political pressure in France is such that it seems not to matter that an innocent man is being offered up in answer to the very understandable demand from families of those who were callously killed over forty years ago that someone, seemingly anyone, be held accountable.

It is not yet clear how things will proceed next.  Will France have the audacity to seek Dr. Diab’s extradition a second time?  Will they instead opt to try him in absentia, itself a flagrant violation of fair trial rights?  Either way Dr. Diab and his family, who have been trapped in a surreal Kafkaesque world of injustice for 14 years, currently face the prospect of several more years of the same. It is intolerable and it must end.

That is why we recently joined over one hundred lawyers and legal academics in an Open Letter to Minister Lametti during the recent election, urging him to convey to French authorities that Canada will not in any way continue to participate in this profound miscarriage of justice. Very concretely that means going on the record making it clear that Canada will not agree to a further extradition request if such is forthcoming.

Hassan Diab’s fiasco also points to the need for Canada’s extradition treaty with France to be renegotiated and for reforms of Canada’s Extradition Act to ensure stronger human rights protections. The Canadian judge who ordered Dr Diab’s first extradition in 2014 did so reluctantly, and with serious doubts about the validity of the evidence. How many more lives will be ruined by an unjust law? The last round of extradition reform was over 20 years ago and stripped away safeguards in the law. Dr. Diab’s experience make it clear much needs to be addressed.

While not much changed in the election, there must now be real change for Hassan Diab. The next Minister of Justice must be mandated to unflinchingly defend his rights and to fix Canada’s flawed Extradition Act.

*Co-authored with Sharry Aiken and Paul Champ and originally published as an Opinion Piece in the Ottawa Citizen on October 4, 2021.