One year on: My shaken but determined belief that human rights will prevail in Northeast Syria
My confidence that my country is prepared truly to stand for human rights, particularly when it is controversial and politically risky to do so, is diminished and shaken today.
A year ago to the day, literally in the final hours of five days on the ground in Northeast Syria, I was part of a humanitarian civil society delegation – also including Senator Kim Pate, retired Canadian ambassador Scott Heatherington and immigration and human rights lawyer Hadayt Nazami – that was granted access to two Canadian men, held in two separate prisons.
It took considerable advocacy to get through those prison doors. For days we had been told variably that we would not be allowed to see any of the nine Canadian men we believed to be held in prisons in Northeast Syria, that it would be difficult to make arrangements to interview them and even, in Jack Letts’ case, that it was not known where he was being held.
Two days earlier we had been allowed to interview four women – one a Canadian citizen, the other three not – who among them are the mothers of thirteen young Canadian children, all of whom have been held in the dangerous, unhealthy and overcrowded Al-Roj detention camp for years.
Each of these interviews was haunting. There was much we could not ask, and much that they could not tell us, as prison and camp officials, and representatives of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (which is the Syrian Kurdish de facto governing authority for this region, faced with enormous security and humanitarian challenges and nowhere near enough international support), were present at all times. But even under those constraints there were so many deeply troubling accounts that came spilling out.
Violence and mistreatment, and fear of more. A range of serious health concerns, including for the children, which largely go under or untreated. Disregard for the well-being and best interests of those children, including something as vital as access to basic education. The soul-destroying prospect of mothers and children being forced apart. Dangerous, life-threatening and inhumane conditions in the camps and prisons. Inadequate food and safe water. Women facing menacing threats, sexual violence and attacks from others in the camps. Men in the prisons virtually cut off from the outside world, including from wives, parents, siblings and children who in some instances have had no word even if they are still alive for over five years. And so much more. It is, in fact, hard to think of a universal human rights principle that is not disregarded and violated in these cruel places of detention.
Overarching all of this is wholesale contempt for the most fundamental principle of liberty and justice, that no one should be arbitrarily locked up without being charged with a recognized offence and given access to a fair and prompt legal process that offers them a meaningful opportunity to present a defence. No one should endure that for seven weeks or seven months, let alone the seven years and counting that has become the Kafkaesque reality for most of these Canadians, and for the tens of thousands of others, both Syrian and foreign nationals, who have been illegally detained, abused and forgotten for years. Foreign intelligence and policing services are given free rein, particularly the FBI, and seem to interview prisoners, particularly the men, whenever they like. But never with a lawyer and never toward the goal of bringing charges or being released.
It all feels like Guantánamo Bay redux, this time on steroids. The same determined effort to warehouse a huge number of people as far beyond the reach and protection of the law as possible, attaching the same extremist label to all of them, and with absolutely no end in sight. At Guantánamo it was hundreds of people, in Northeast Syria it is tens of thousands. At Guantánamo it was a handful of children, in Northeast Syria over 25,000 are kids.
Perhaps what is most galling for me today, a year after those two prison visits and the time we spent in the camp, is the Canadian government’s utter disregard for its own citizens, including the seven children who are still there. There has been no lack of ploys behind and excuses for that disinterest and inaction.
First and foremost, in the court of public opinion they have all been tarred with the accusatory brush of being ISIS fighters, militants and supporters, who made their own egregious choices to leave Canada to engage in terrorism and therefore deserve no sympathy or assistance. Seemingly this extends even to five-year-old children? Women who were trafficked? Men who were in the wrong place at the wrong time? Of course, there may well be credible evidence that points to some of these individuals being responsible for acts of serious criminality. All the more reason, therefore, to make sure that justice runs its course. We have the police, intelligence services, laws and courts to do so.
We have also repeatedly been told that consular assistance is not being provided and repatriation has been slow to materialize because it is too dangerous, too expensive, too isolated and too difficult for Canadian officials to travel to the area. Our own travel exposed that to be an excuse with no clothes.
We continue to press the government to comply with human rights through consular support and, critically, repatriation. UN experts have in fact made it clear that the only way to protect human rights in these circumstances is for governments to repatriate their citizens from Northeast Syria, to bring them home either to freedom or to a fair system of justice. All we get back in response are variations of the same empty complaint: these are complex cases. Of course they are; whoever said otherwise. But while that excuse may have been somewhat justified at early stages, it is definitely not as we pass seven years of illegal detention and unrelenting grave harms.
The last prisoner we were allowed to interview on that Sunday night a year ago was Jack Letts, in the waning hours of our final day. At the end of the interview, he asked us whether we thought he would still be there, locked up and abandoned, in ten years.
It was an impossible question to answer. On one hand we did not want to crush his hope and on the other, we did not want to give rise to false hope. I said that I was sure he would not be there in ten years but made it clear that he was not imminently going to be freed. Right or wrong, naïve or optimistic, I told him that I was hopeful he would be back in Canada within a year.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of that hopeful one-year prediction I offered Jack. Clearly I got it wrong and my faith that ultimately Canadian justice would take hold was entirely misplaced. I can only imagine how empty and hollow any assurances of justice and the rule of law must seem to him in his prison cell today. When he posed the question to me he had been locked up for over six years. Now it is seven years and nearly four months; and counting.
If I was back in that prison today, meeting again with Jack, would I, in all honesty, have to admit that my belief that Canada is a country that would not allow such blatant injustice and disregard for the tenets of international human rights to continue for another decade has been shattered?
Perhaps I would, but I refuse to go to that place of cynicism and cave in to the hopeless despair that has come to define not only Canada’s, but the world’s approach to the plight of the tens of thousands of people, more than half of them children, who remain illegally detained in Northeast Syria.
It will take work to deliver justice, of course it will. It will cost money to deliver justice, of course it will. It will take political will and courage to deliver justice, of course it will. But continuing to turn our back on justice is untenable and profoundly, morally wrong. It betrays our shared humanity. That, in the long run, is far more expensive.
If instead of our delegation a year ago, it had been a Canadian government official meeting with Jack in that prison (which they have never done), how would they have answered? We have no idea when you will leave this place? So be it if your detention is indeterminate and indefinite? There is presently no end in sight? We simply cannot abide by that; it is too deep a betrayal of what we aspire to as a nation.
It pains me to know that I let Jack down when I gave him hope of justice within a year. And that I let him down because my country has essentially decided that human rights do not fully apply to him or to other Canadians trapped in the harrowing labyrinth of injustice in Northeast Syria.
Enough. This simply has to end. Now. I’m not giving up. None of us can.
