JUSTICE DELAYED
The mother and uncle of Jassi Sidhu were on a plane Thursday awaiting extradition to India to face trial for her 2000 slaying. But they were taken off at the last minute after a B.C. court ordered a delay.
The extradition of two B.C. residents to India over the alleged honour killing of a young family member has suddenly been put on hold, the pair’s expulsion stalled by an unusual spate of legal wrangling.
The surprising turn of events came two weeks after the Supreme Court of Canada had approved the federal government’s decision to hand over Malkit Kaur Sidhu and Surjit Badesha to Indian authorities.
Indian media reports say police from the Punjab were already in Vancouver and had taken custody of the pair when the B.C. Court of Appeal ruled Thursday that it would hear a new challenge of the extradition — leading to an extraordinary last-minute intervention at the Vancouver airport, after Sidhu and Badesha had already been loaded onto the airplane that was to return them to India. “The Canadian officials made the two accused and the Punjab police team alight from the plane at the last minute,” a Punjab police spokesperson told the Indian newspaper The Tribune. “They had boarded the plane with due permission of the Canadian government.”
The Court of Appeal’s 2-1 decision came after a convoluted sequence of legal events.
It started with a request by the pair’s lawyers to have federal justice minister Judy Wilson-Raybould reconsider her decision to extradite, based on new information they had received about the case, said Michael Klein, Badesha’s lawyer.
Klein said Thursday he has not heard from his client in 48 hours. But an inmate at the jail where Badesha was being held informed family members that the two were being moved, likely to immigration cells near Vancouver airport.
The lawyers rushed to court, fearing Sidhu and Badesha would be flown out of the country before the minister’s response to their request for a reconsideration had been properly assessed by the courts.
“We learned through what I can only describe as a clandestine process … there was movement afoot to remove the two persons from Canada before any review could have taken place,” said Klein. “It appears that the machinations over the last couple of days were designed to circumvent any meaningful review.”
He said he was not free to reveal the nature of the new information, but multiple Indian outlets reported it involved Facebook posts originating in India which suggested Sidhu and Badesha would be convicted immediately, rather than receiving a fair trial.
Federal justice department officials could not be reached for a response before deadline. A spokesman for the Indian High Commission said the mission was unable to comment Thursday.
Sidhu and Badesha, Canadian citizens living in the Vancouver area, were charged by Indian police with ordering the killing of Sidhu’s daughter, Jawinder (Jassi) Sidhu. She had secretly married Sukhwinder Singh Sidhu, a rickshaw driver, instead of a wealthy older man chosen for her.
The couple were attacked by armed men in 2000 in the Punjab region of India, Jassi’s body found the next day, her throat slit. The husband was badly beaten.
A B.C. trial-court judge approved the extradition in 2014, but that decision was overturned by the province’s appeal court. Finally this month, the Supreme Court reversed the appeal judgment and ruled the extradition could go ahead. It said the federal government had seriously considered allegations the pair could be mistreated by Indian police and received assurances that that would not happen.
In documents filed in court, Klein says a representative of Wilson-Raybould communicated on Wednesday that if the minister decided not to reconsider the extradition, Sidhu and Badesha would be immediately taken from Canada.
The “tenor” of the letter suggested that removal would happen without review of the minister’s new decision, the documents say.
The Court of Appeal agreed Thursday to hold a hearing — not yet scheduled — to consider if it has jurisdiction to intervene in the matter and, if so, to then assess whether the minister’s decision was legally reasonable, said Klein.
To further muddy the waters, meanwhile, the minister appears not to have actually issued her decision on the request to reconsider — the act the court is now supposed to review.
Klein admitted the situation is unusual. “I’ve never experienced it before,” he said.
“It appears that the machinations over the last couple of days were designed to circumvent any meaningful review. — Lawyer Michael Klein