Canadian torture victims to get $31M payout
Ottawa finally reveals amount of settlement for three men jailed in Syria in wake of 9/11
OTTAWA— Three Muslim Canadian men, detained and tortured in the Middle East during the security frenzy that followed 9/11, will get $31.25 million from the federal government.
The payout was kept secret until this month and is part of a legal settlement that was first reported by the Star in February and announced by the Liberal government weeks later.
The resolution and accompanying government apology put an end to a nineyear court battle for compensation that has been demanded since 2008, when a former Supreme Court judge blamed Canadian officials in part for the men’s ordeals. Between 2001 and 2003, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin were jailed separately in Syria and tortured by interrogators who acted, in part, on information from the Canadian spy agency CSIS and the RCMP.
Former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci concluded, in his 2008 report on their cases, that Canadian agents labelled the men Islamic extremists and shared information with other countries without proper precautions about its unreliability. The men were never charged. They sued Ottawa for $100 million. In March, the Liberal government announced it had reached a settlement and Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale apologized to Almalki, El Maati and Nureddin for “any role Canadian officials may have played” in what led to their arrests and torture.
While the government still refused to say how much it would pay each of the men on Thursday, the $31.25million settlement was revealed in government accounting documents tabled in the House of Commons on Oct. 5 and quietly published online.
In an interview with the Star, Almalki said he’s ready to try to move on from a terrible episode in his life that has stretched on for 15 years. He wouldn’t discuss the settlement because it’s confidential, and said people should instead focus on how to change the system so that something like this never happens again.
“We were falsely targeted based on racism and bigotry,” said Almalki, 46, who lives in Ottawa with his family.
“I had to fight for years to get an inquiry, and then to show that’s what (Canadian officials) did. They falsely accused us of things we had absolutely nothing to do with.”
Speaking in Burlington on Thursday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the payout “a difficult lesson” for what happens when Canadian governments “of any stripe” allow a citizen’s rights to be violated.
“I certainly hope that people remain concerned, angry and even outraged at these settlements, because no future government should ever imagine that it’s a good idea or an acceptable idea to allow Canadians’ fundamental rights to be violated,” he said.
“When we don’t stand up for people’s rights, it ends up costing all of us.” On Parliament Hill, Goodale claimed the government was transparent about the settlement cost by reporting the payouts in the accounting documents published this month. He said that’s what was promised when the settlement was announced in March.
Asked if the amount would have been less had the Conservatives settled after the Iacobucci inquiry in 2008, Goodale appeared to agree. “Delay is always expensive,” he said. The Conservatives did not quibble with the payout to the three men as they did when they denounced the $10.5-million settlement for former Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr, which was announced in July.
Rob Nicholson, a Conservative MP who was minister of justice, foreign affairs and national defence during the Harper era, told reporters that “to the extent that false information was given to foreign agencies, which was apparently what this case was all about, they certainly deserved compensation.”
His caucus colleague, Peter Kent, added that the three men in this case are victims who “deserved every penny” of their settlement.
El Maati, a Toronto truck driver, was the first of three men to be arrested when he travelled to Syria in November 2001 for his wedding and was stopped at the Damascus airport. He was transferred to Egypt two months later and was jailed there for more than two years.
In 2010, El Maati told the Star he was shackled, beaten and jolted with electrical shocks on his back, legs and genitals while he was detained in Egypt.
Almalki, a Syrian-Canadian dual citizen who works as a communications engineer, was arrested in May 2002, also at the Damascus airport, and detained for 22 months.
In December 2003, Nureddin was arrested by Syrian officials as he crossed into the country from Iraq, where he was visiting family. The Toronto geologist was held for 33 days. The men were never charged. In his 2008 report, Iacobucci called for the government to apologize and compensate the men for how officials “indirectly” or “likely contributed” to their imprisonment and torture.
The cases of the three men are similar to the more widely publicized ordeal of Canadian Maher Arar, who received $10.5 million from Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in January 2007. He, too, was detained for almost a year in 2002 and tortured in Syria after Canadian intelligence wrongfully flagged him for suspected terrorist links.
The current Liberal government apologized to former Guantanamo Bay detainee Khadr in July. Almalki said of his own circumstances that he’s hoping to finally live a more normal life, without having to be an “open book” by devoting his time to clearing his name.
He added that when news of the settlement cost broke Thursday, his landline and all the cellphones in his house started ringing with inquiries from reporters.
“I understand the public curiosity. I would be curious, too. But I do think it is critically important for our country, for reforming the system, and making it better . . . that’s where the conversation ought to be. We need to know this. We need to study this. We need to keep it in mind.”