Accountability elusive in case of Soleiman Faqiri
On most Fridays, you will find Yusuf Faqiri’s tall, broad frame hunched over a small grave marker at a cemetery in Ajax.
For the past three and a half years, the 36-year-old public servant has been visiting his brother’s final resting place with a promise in mind: to hold those responsible for his death accountable.
Yet fulfilling that promise has been painfully elusive, highlighting concerning dysfunction in our justice system.
Yusuf’s brother Soleiman, also fondly known as Soli, was diagnosed with schizophrenia following a car accident while studying environmental engineering at the University of Waterloo. Up until then, he had been the rock of his family — a straight-A student who even taught his mother how to read. Following his diagnosis, his family watched his health deteriorate and, from time to time, police would be asked to intervene under the Mental Health Act.
The last such incident involved an altercation with a neighbour that resulted for the first time in various assault charges against Soleiman. But instead of medical treatment, Soleiman was taken to prison and put into segregation, waiting for a bed to become available at a nearby hospital. He remained in solitary confinement for 11 days.
His family would never see him alive again. They were simply notified of Soleiman’s death without any given explanation. No one from the jail or from the Ministry of the Solicitor General offered condolences.
What happened inside has now been the subject of two criminal investigations, an internal ministry probe, a coroner’s report and a media investigation that included the testimony of an eyewitness. Every piece of information and revelation to date has clearly pointed to a system that not only failed to protect a vulnerable young man but that was responsible for his demise.
No one has been fully held accountable.
The most recent blow to the Faqiri family came last week when the Ontario Provincial Police concluded that it wouldn’t seek criminal charges against any of the corrections officers involved in the confrontation that led to Soleiman’s death.
The force’s unconscionable reasoning was it couldn’t ascertain exactly who did what in the melee that saw Soleiman punched, pepper-sprayed, shackled and covered in a spit-hood before taking his final breaths inside his isolation cell. “It’s a huge slap in the face to the family of Soleiman Faqiri and to all Canadians who expect that the police do their job diligently, regardless of who the alleged perpetrators are or who the alleged victims are,” said the family’s lawyer, Nader Hasan, in an interview. “There is no doubt in my mind that the outcome would have been different if Soleiman wasn’t in pre-trial custody and his killers weren’t correctional officers.”
Hasan isn’t alone in questioning the OPP’s reasoning, which it has claimed is based on a legal opinion from the local Crown attorney’s office that it refuses to make public. Other prominent criminal and human rights lawyers, including Paul Champ and Clayton Ruby, have similarly spoken out against the force’s conclusion, which essentially suggests that if a group of people kill someone, no one can be held responsible unless it is absolutely clear who did what. With the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement and the subsequent spotlight on police brutality of Black and brown people in both the United States and Canada, this case is one more example of why little trust exists between communities of colour and state institutions.
“This unrelenting violence against Black, Indigenous and racialized people, particularly those whose lives intersect with disability, reflects a massive failure of government — at all levels — to meet its obligations to protect and promote human dignity, equity and non-discrimination. This violence must end now,” reads a statement released this week and signed by a host of organizations serving racialized communities, including the Black Legal Action Centre and the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants. They, too, are demanding answers.
The burden of pushing for reform shouldn’t rest solely on the shoulders of those who have lost someone to systems that keep failing. Justice is a collective promise we owe each other. Keeping it starts with accountability.
This case is one more example of why little trust exists between communities of colour and state institutions