SPEAKING UP FOR ENERGY
Morneau vows support
As Rob Tibbo raced to the Hong Kong International Airport one day last November to catch his getaway flight, a nagging fear followed close behind. Tibbo, a Canadian expatriate lawyer and respected officer of the local courts, had been in hiding from the police for a month and still worried he could be arrested at any moment.
But his taxi arrived at the airport without incident, and Tibbo was soon in safe hands: Pascal Paradis, a Montreal-based leader of the group Lawyers without Borders, and two Canadian diplomats shadowed him through security, making sure he safely boarded the Vancouver-bound Air Canada jet.
First, though, he bid an emotional farewell to several of his impoverished clients also waiting in the terminal, among them migrants who, along with Tibbo, had found themselves in the midst of a story that shook the world.
A year earlier, the National Post — along with the New York Times and Germany’s Handelsblatt — had revealed that the lawyer had arranged for American spy-agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, at the time the planet’s most-wanted man after leaking details of U.S. mass-surveillance programs, to hide in the Hong Kong homes of three refugee families before catching his own flight to Moscow.
Now they all seemed to be facing the consequences of that fateful act.
“My clients were de-facto participants in the whistle-blowing exercise that Mr. Snowden made, and the Hong Kong government just wants them to disappear,” Tibbo told the National Post in a recent interview from his temporary home in southern France.
As for the lawyer himself: “I can’t go back, and I’m not going back.”
In the two years since the story of Snowden’s exodus became public, the refugees and Tibbo have faced what appears to be a broad campaign of harassment and intimidation, the full scope of which has never before been reported.
Various Hong Kong authorities strenuously deny there has been any concerted or politically motivated targeting of the Snowden group.
But days after the stories appeared revealing the refugees’ role in Snowden’s escape, their asylum cases — all instigated at different times and on hold for years — were suddenly reactivated together, and rejected on the same day.
The migrants were effectively cut off from social assistance in a city where asylum seekers are barred from working, while foreign police with a grim history of human-rights abuses showed up in Hong Kong to try to track some of them down.
Tibbo himself faced escalating pressure from the authorities. The legal-aid organizations that funded the refugee cases choked off payments and questioned his professionalism, while Hong Kong’s legal regulator peppered the lawyer with disciplinary charges after a spotless 15-year career in the territory.
When it seemed the police, too, were on his trail, Tibbo decided he had to leave.
“I’m pretty much out of money. My wife and I are pretty much living in poverty,” he told the Post. “The bottom line is my career in Hong Kong is over.”
There are a number of reasons why Hong Kong officials — or their overseers in Beijing — might want to hound the group, Tibbo said, including that their tale has legitimized and drawn embarrassing attention to refugee claimants who have long been treated abysmally in the territory. And any country harbouring a secret surveillance apparatus, he speculated, would see Snowden and his enablers as a threat.
“This is retaliation at its most brazen,” Snowden himself told the Post via text message from his temporary refuge in Russia. “You can’t look at something like this without getting a sense that the mask has dropped … (and) there’s a machine that would burn everything we love to the ground without a tear if it meant making a problem go away.”
Snowden said he has little doubt that American officials are also pulling strings in Hong Kong, doing “what they can to make the lives of the families harder, because they’re a symbol.”
Tibbo, meanwhile, said he will keep fighting until his clients are on Canadian soil, after a group of Montreal lawyers applied in January 2017 to have them admitted here as refugees.
Canadian authorities must act fast or will be “condemning them to death,” one of those advocates told the Post, as the asylum seekers are otherwise likely to be sent back to their home countries, and a fate that terrifies them.
“They have been increasingly targeted by Hong Kong authorities,” said Montreal lawyer Marc-André Séguin, who is spearheading the migrants’ Canadian claims.
A spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said the department cannot comment on individual applicants, but said claims are generally considered on a “first-in, first-out basis,” with some exceptions made for urgent situations.
Snowden was a contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 when he fled to Hong Kong with classified documents that showed his government and some of its allies had been conducting surveillance of the Internet and telephones that caught millions of ordinary Americans and other citizens in their dragnet.