‘THEY’RE VERY UNCOMFORTABLE WITH THE SNOWDEN REFUGEES’
Holed up in a five-star hotel, Snowden leaked the documents to journalists, triggering heated debate about the broad reach of post-9/11 digital spying — and accusations he had betrayed his country by committing its biggest-ever intelligence breach.
With American authorities filing Espionage Act charges against him, Snowden flew to Moscow, planning to press on from there to Latin America. But for two weeks before arriving in Russia, he disappeared.
It was not until September 2016 that Tibbo revealed Snowden’s whereabouts during those frantic days. Retained to act for Snowden, Tibbo had convinced three refugee families whom he also represented to hide Snowden where no one would think to look: the slums that are home to thousands of penniless asylum seekers in one of the world’s richest cities.
The Montreal native, who had been practising law in Hong Kong since 2004, said he decided to go public about the events in 2016 after director Oliver Stone told him the refugees’ role in the saga would be featured in his 2016 movie, Snowden.
In an interview with the Post, Stone, famous for such films as Platoon and Wall Street, said he learned about the migrants’ actions from Snowden, but made sure none were identified in the movie. He said he was surprised when they went public, assuming they did so to improve their meagre prospects in a jurisdiction infamous for rejecting refugee claims.
“I think a gamble was taken to bring attention to them in a positive way,” Stone said. “It doesn’t seem like that worked.”
Tibbo said he believed the movie would shine a spotlight on his clients — even if they were not named — and that making their role even more public would keep them safer.
“I didn’t want the clients in the shadows, because it’s in the shadows that they’d end up disappearing or being killed.”
Snowden was hidden by a Sri Lankan couple who have two children, another unrelated Sri Lankan man and a Filipino woman and her daughter. The three families came to Hong Kong at different points and had been in limbo for years. But within days of their acts being publicized in 2016, the Hong Kong Immigration Department announced it was bringing all their cases to hearings imminently.
On a single day — May 11, 2017 — every one of the Snowden refugees was denied asylum. Their appeals were also scheduled much faster than the norm; they are awaiting the outcomes of those now.
“Clearly there is an attempt at getting rid of my clients,” said Seguin.
Hong Kong’s Immigration Department (ImmD) told the Post it rejects any accusations it singled out particular people for unusual treatment. Screening has been sped up over the last few years to clear a backlog of asylum cases, with the number processed jumping from 826 in 2014 to 4,546 so far this year, it said in an emailed response to questions.
The agency also blamed Tibbo and his “frequent unavailability” due to personal travel for earlier delays in the cases.
Tibbo, Seguin, Lawyers Without Borders and two of his clients whom the Post interviewed dismissed the suggestion that the lawyer has done anything but represent his clients diligently, often at his own expense.
Regardless, there was more bad news for the Snowden families when they visited the Swiss contractor, International Social Services (ISS), that administers social assistance for the Hong Kong government. Such aid was a necessity for them, given strict laws barring asylum seekers from working or even begging.
When Filipino Vanessa Rodel and Sri Lankan couple Supun Thilina and Nadeeka Nonis inquired about the assistance they were receiving, they say their welfare case officers grilled them about the help they had given Snowden three years earlier. Each referred the inquiries to Tibbo.
Then, bit by bit, they were effectively denied any further assistance, Tibbo said, as was the Sri Lankan man, Ajith Kumara.
Welfare case officers “asked me how many days Edward Snowden stayed in my house,” Rodel recalled in an interview. “I refused to answer the question and they cut all my assistance … I’m shocked.”
ISS spokeswoman Connie Hui said the agency only asks questions that help determine clients’ needs, and said allegations the migrants were punished for not providing information on Snowden are “absolutely misconceived and entirely baseless.”
For the last two years, the seven refugees’ rent, food and other living expenses have been covered with funds raised by Tibbo and For the Refugees, the Canadian NGO Seguin runs that was set up to sponsor them.
Finally, three months after the stories of Snowden’s Hong Kong sanctuary were published, the lawyer was speaking at a conference in Germany when he got word of another troubling development.
Two officers from the Sri Lankan police criminal investigation department were in Hong Kong, trying to find Ajith, Supun and Nadeeka. They learned the department had also harassed their families back home.
Given the Sri Lankan security sector’s well-documented record of torture and other abuses, it was chilling news and spread quickly among migrants from the country, said Ranjith Prabha, another of Tibbo’s clients.
“Everybody was shocked,” he said in an interview.
But the Hong Kong police took four months to begin looking into the reports and then denied the foreign detectives ever came, while refusing to check immigration records to back up their contention, Tibbo said.
Tibbo, meanwhile, was facing mounting pressure from the Hong Kong Bar Association, which regulates the profession locally. First it abruptly pushed forward a long-dormant complaint of alleged rudeness to a prosecutor, which Tibbo’s own lawyer called “trivial garbage.”
Then he was notified of an unusual anonymous complaint signed by a “large group of exasperated barristers.”
Citing the Post’s Snowden story, it alleged that Tibbo had put the refugees in danger, via the “disgraceful touting” of his work — and had hurt the Hong Kong bar by appearing in a photo with an “international fugitive.”
Paradis, of Lawyers Without Borders Canada, suggested Tibbo is “being pushed around and pressured” because of the clients he represents.
Tibbo said he took pains to ensure each refugee consented to sheltering the American — an act he said was perfectly legal — and later to going public about it. Rodel, for one, said she has no regrets.
“I helped him from the bottom of my heart,” she said of Snowden. “There was no pressure for me, no thinking twice to help him … What he’s done, I’m very proud of him, he’s a hero.”
Robert Pang, a bar association spokesman, rejected any suggestion the agency was trying to persecute Tibbo. The association was going to investigate the Canadian because of the decision he and his clients made to publicize their actions.
“To allow them to be identified with Edward Snowden, and to have their names, photographs and where they live widely publicized could well be damaging to their safety and interests,” he said.
Under mounting pressure and afraid of what would happen next, Tibbo persuaded his wife to fly to Canada in June of last year, taking with her their three cats and dog, a rescue Siberian husky.
Four months later, he said, he heard seven police officers had shown up looking for him at their thenempty home on Hong Kong’s Lantao Island. He went “underground,” living in a succession of friends’ homes to evade police, while still appearing at meetings and hearings for his clients.
In an echo of Snowden’s departure four years earlier, Tibbo finally made his escape last Nov. 30.
He and his six clients, some of whom were at the airport to say goodbye, are victims, he maintained, of a decision to help the man who exposed some of the world’s most closely held secrets.
“If you look at all the evidence together,” he said, “to me it’s quite obvious that the Hong Kong government, the Chinese government, whichever government it is — they’re very uncomfortable with the Snowden refugees.”
I REFUSED TO ANSWER ... THEY CUT ALL MY ASSISTANCE.