Immigration fight bogs down
A four-year fight by U.S. whistleblower Chelsea Manning for permission to come to Canada will continue until at least next year, after her immigration hearing ended Friday not with a decision, but a lengthy timetable for more legal arguments.
Manning, 33, was deemed inadmissible to Canada because of criminal convictions in the United States after she leaked a massive trove of U.S. military and diplomatic secrets to Wikileaks in 2010.
That designation by Canada Border Services Agency blocks her from visiting Canada, and Manning is fighting the decision at the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB).
Manning’s lawyers, Joshua Blum and Lex Gill, argued the charges she was convicted of in the U.S. are not equivalent to the criminal offences in Canada that the government used as the basis for banning Manning from the country.
Canadian law declares it an offence to share damaging government secrets to a “foreign entity” or a “terrorist group,” unlike U.S. laws that do not care who receives the information for a finding of guilt.
At the hearing Friday, Gill asked the government’s lawyers which Ottawa considers Wikileaks to be: terrorists or a foreign entity?
The federal government lawyers, Josée Barrette and Anthony Lashley, said to wait for their written submissions to find out.
Manning was convicted under the U.S. Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and sentenced to 35 years in prison, the longest sentence ever issued in the United States for whistleblowing.
In 2017, after seven years in prison, Manning’s sentence was commuted by U.S. President Barack Obama. Shortly after, Manning tried to visit friends in Montreal but was stopped at the border.
The two-day IRB hearing that ended Friday did not settle the matter.
Instead, the IRB gave lawyers timetables for submitting additional written arguments — on top of the hundreds of pages of exhibits submitted by the government and more than 1,000 pages from Manning.
Manning also argues there was no evidence the leaked material caused actual harm to the United States, and that she leaked it as a public service and in the public interest.
Earlier at the hearing, Manning described her extraordinary experience as one of the best-known whistleblowers of the digital age, and the repercussions she faced, both legally and mentally.
While a military analyst with the U.S. Army deployed to Iraq, Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of documents, including an explosive video of two U.S. helicopters opening fire and killing 11 people on the ground, including two children and two journalists.
She said she did it to alert the public to what was really going on in the war on terror and how it differed from official versions.
The material Manning gave to Wikileaks included about 75,000 Afghanistan war-related significant activity reports, 400,000 Iraq war-related significant activity reports, 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs, and 250,000 U.S. Department of State diplomatic cables.
IRB adjudicator Marisa Musto gave the government 30 days to provide its written submissions, followed by 30 days for Manning’s lawyers to respond to it. The government then has until Dec. 20 to reply to Manning’s submission.
Musto said her decision would be issued in writing, and because of the large volume of materials and complexity of the issues, would not be doing so until early 2022.
If Musto accepts the government decision that Manning is inadmissible to Canada, and that she’s not covered by whistleblower protections, the IRB will then have to consider Manning’s constitutional challenge of the laws used to restrict her from entering Canada.