LAW SOCIETY ANSWERS WHETHER A TAMIL TIGER CAN CHANGE STRIPES.
FIGHT TO BECOME LAWYER A STORY OF `CONTRITION, REDEMPTION'
As he completed his degree at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Suresh Sriskandarajah filed his membership application to the Law Society of Ontario, a required step to work as a lawyer. Like all would-be lawyers, he was asked eight questions as a test of “good character.”
The first question was a doozy: Had he ever been convicted of a crime? He answered yes and it’s taken three years for the law society to sort out what to do with his unusual case.
When Sriskandarajah was a graduate student at the University of Waterloo in 2006, he was arrested in Canada at the request of the United States in a shocking terrorism probe.
U. S. court doc uments referred to him as “Waterloo Suresh,” an agent of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), better known as the Tamil Tigers, which at the time was fighting for a Tamil homeland separate from Sri Lanka. The Tigers was declared a terrorist organization in Canada the same year he was arrested.
He was one of six Canadians charged in the FBI probe.
While three of them were arrested in New York after a meeting to buy anti-aircraft missiles and other military weapons, Sriskandarajah was accused of researching and acquiring communications, aviation, and night-vision equipment, and warship-design software.
It took six years for him to be extradited to the U.S. while he appealed, all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.
By then, he had almost finished his first semester of law school; 14,000 kilometres away, the fighting in Sri Lanka was over. The country was working towards reconciliation. The Sri Lankan government even asked the U. S. to stop its prosecution against him.
It didn’t. In 2013, Sriskandarajah pleaded guilty in a New York courtroom to conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization and was sentenced to two years in prison.
He put his time at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn to good use, tutoring dozens of inmates and writing his own first-semester law school exams.
Although his legal and prison experience gave him insight into the criminal justice system, his is not the background the law society recommends for new lawyers.
Concerned with his past and obliged to ponder his future, the society referred Sriskandarajah to a good character investigation.
When asked by investigators to provide a reflection on what the public expects of a lawyer, Sriskandarajah wrote: “A lawyer should act with integrity — not simply honesty, but with candour and the strength of good character to take accountability when mistakes are made,” he wrote. “They must not only act within the Rules of Professional Conduct but be mindful of the consequences of their actions.”
Candour and conse - quences.
These became hallmarks of Sriskandarajah’s two-year fight to become a lawyer.
The Law Society Tribunal contemplated if a man convicted of a terrorism offence should be a lawyer and the proper place for remorse, rehabilitation and personal growth.
Is Sriskandarajah a man of good character?
Could a tiger change his stripes?
In hundreds of pages of documentation submitted over months during a law society investigation and hearing, Sriskandarajah laid out his life.
“In my teenage years and early 20s, I was highly driven to change the world and right injustices. I was restless, wanted things to happen quickly and I felt invincible,” he wrote.
Sriskandarajah was born in 1980, a minority Tamil in Sri Lanka amid increasing civil strife.
At the age of seven he was home alone when a relative burst into his house in a panic — he had swallowed a cyanide capsule when evading government soldiers and desperately needed oil to drink, to counteract it. Unable to stop the effects of the poison, Sriskandarajah watched the young man die, he recounted.
Soon after, his father jumped off the oil tanker he worked on as a deckhand when it arrived in the port of Montreal and claimed refugee status in Canada. His mother and a brother joined his father here a year later, leaving Sriskandarajah, just eight, with family. It took another year to gather enough money for Sriskandarajah and another brother to make the trip to reunite the family.
In 1994 he became a Canadian citizen.
He always excelled in school. He studied engineering at Ontario’s University of Waterloo.
It was on a co-op placement in 2004 that he first returned to Sri Lanka, to set up a technology training centre in the northeastern region, where the LTTE was the de facto government. When he arrived, he was told he needed permission from the LTTE to continue his project.
At a meeting with an LTTE representative, he said he “was pressured to abandon his humanitarian work in order to teach computer programming to members of the LTTE’s technology division.”
If he refused, he believed he would have to leave. So he agreed to help over four months while volunteering at an orphanage.
“I did not appreciate the broader implications my decision to associate with the Tamil Tigers would have.
However, at no point did I support any forms of violence,” he wrote.
He returned to Sri Lanka a second time, over Christmas that same year, for a youth conference. While there, a powerful earthquake under the Indian Ocean sent tidal waves crashing over the coastal areas of several countries, including Sri Lanka. It is now known as the Boxing Day tsunami.
He rushed to the orphanage where he had previously volunteered and found 150 of the 170 children there had been killed, he said.
“I felt compelled to assist in any way I could. I became involved in relief efforts, including the burial of dead bodies, speaking with foreign media in an attempt to give voice and raise awareness to the destruction I had personally witnessed.” The only ones he saw helping were from the LTTE, he said.
Once back in Canada, he continued his studies, receiving scholarships and awards. He also kept helping the LTTE, providing technical support and equipment, including laptops and GPS devices, taken to Sri Lanka by other students.
After his arrest, when he was released on bail, he tried to return to normal life.
Six months before his extradition, Sriskandarajah was married. He finished his first semester of law school at the University of Ottawa, but before he could write his exams, he was taken to New York for his trial.
Sriskandarajah’s case has always been a riddle.
Raymond Dearie, the judge presiding over his trial in New York voiced the conundrum from the bench: “Everything about him is positive, but for his involvement in this activity.”
Sriskandarajah was deported back to Canada after serving his sentence in 2014. He returned to his law studies, transferring to York University’s Osgoode Hall. He graduated with honours.
That’s when the law society needed to decide how to handle Sriskandarajah’s application.
“My time in prison changed me forever; it gave me perspective and forced me to look at myself and evaluate my weaknesses,” he told the panel.
“I often relive the events post-2004 and know how differently I would approach that situation now. I do not believe the ends justify the means. They do not, and I have paid a heavy price for having made that mistake once.”
Nearly 100 letters of support were submitted on his behalf — from family and friends, law school professors and classmates, community members and employers.
Among them was support from Craig Scott, a law professor and former member of Parliament: “If the (law society) were to decide a person of Suresh’s character is not eligible, this would be a signal that our legal profession does not accept contrition and redemption as truly operative values,” Scott wrote.
Earlier this month, a three- lawyer panel came to a unanimous decision: Sriskandarajah passed the good character requirement and is eligible to be granted a lawyer’s licence. The reasons for the decision have not yet been released.
Sriskandarajah declined to comment before the written decision was issued. He referred the request to his lawyer.
“Mr. Sriskandarajah appreciated the opportunity to share both his past and his present life with the panel. He is grateful for the panel’s decision finding him to be of good character,” said Nadia Liva, on his behalf.
“Mr. Sriskandarajah looks forward to serving as a member of the Law Society of Ontario with integrity and honour.”