PM urged to assist Snowden’s helpers

Director wants Canada to take them as refugees

Some emotional scenes appear near the end of Oliver Stone’s 2016 movie on Edward Snowden, depicting how penniless asylum seekers hid the American whistleblower and fugitive in their Hong Kong homes for two weeks.

Now those same people and their children are allegedly facing a campaign of intimidation, and the director is urging Canada to take them in as refugees.

Stone wrote to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier this year to make the case for the Sri Lankan and Filipino nationals, he revealed in a recent interview.

They had opened their homes to Snowden in 2013 at the request of Canadian lawyer Robert Tibbo, and a Quebec group applied in January of last year to sponsor them as refugees. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada is still considering the request.

“It would be so easy. It’s such a gigantic country and you’ve always had an immigrant-friendly policy,” said Stone. “Immigration makes you stronger. I think these people would be an addition to Canada, for sure.”

Tibbo was retained to represent Snowden after he fled there with stolen classified documents that revealed how U.S. and allied intelligence agencies were running mass-surveillance programs.

Snowden eventually flew to Russia. But for two weeks — as the U.S. charged him with Espionage Act offences and made him the world’s most-wanted man — Tibbo convinced some of his refugee-claimant clients to hide him in their tiny homes.

Lawyers for the migrants say it was legal, as Snowden was not subject to an arrest warrant in Hong Kong and officials there eventually let him leave freely. But Stone says he believes their actions were crucial to protecting the computer consultant’s freedom — at least from U.S. forces.

The Snowden helpers include a Sri Lankan couple and their two children, an unrelated Sri Lankan man and a Filipino woman and her daughter, all of whom fear imprisonment, torture or worse if returned to their countries. The Hong Kong Immigration Department rejected their refugee claims on a single day last year; they’re now awaiting the outcome of appeals.

Lawyers in Montreal set up the group For the Refugees in January 2017 to sponsor them, with Canada possibly being their last hope, said lawyer Marc-andré Séguin, the group’s head.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said it cannot comment on individual cases.