Listen to an live interview with Abousfian Abdelrazik on six years in exile in Sudan and the struggle to return to Canada.
Interview recorded and produced for broadcast on CKUT radio in Montreal by Stefan Christoff...
* Abousfian Abdelrazik: terror, torture, and return http://www.mcgilldaily.com/articles/23025
Abousfian Abdelrazik is a Sudanese-born Canadian citizen who recently returned to Canada after being stranded in Sudan from 2003 to 2009.
Detained, interrogated, and tortured by Sudanese authorities in Khartoum after being profiled by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Abdelrazik was denied the right to return to Canada by successive governments â a clear violation of Canadaâs Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which outlines that âevery citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada.â
Barred from returning to Canada, Abdelrazikâs six years in exile point to a wider context in which multiple Canadian citizens, including Maher Arar in Syria, faced torture and imprisonment abroad resulting from racial profiling by Canadian and U.S. security and intelligence agencies. In Sudan, Canadian CSIS agents interrogated Abdelrazik in the very same Sudanese prison where Sudanese military officials carried out violent torture against him.
In 2008, he took refuge in the Canadian embassy in Khartoum in coordination with an Ottawa-based legal support team, while a grassroots campaign for Abdelrazikâs return quickly spread to communities across Canada lead by the Montreal-based Project Fly Home.
A solidarity campaign with Abdelrazik quickly developed across Canada to apply pressure on the Conservative government to immediately return Abdelrazik to Canada, culminating in April 2009, when activists purchased a return ticket for Abdelrazik, a condition fixed by the Conservative government in order for emergency travel documents to be issued for Abdelrazik to travel home to Canada. Conservative foreign affairs minister Lawrence Cannon went back on the previously expressed conditions for Abdelrazikâs return â refusing to issue an emergency passport â a move that led a Federal Court judge to order the government to return Abdelrazik to Canada in a landmark decision in June 2009.
In the Federal Court decision that forced the Conservatives to issue emergency travel documents to Abdelrazik, Judge Russel Zinn described him as a âprisoner in a foreign landâ and âas much a victim of international terrorism as the innocent persons whose lives have been taken by recent barbaric acts of terrorists.â Zinn also highlighted the direct involvement of CSIS in Abdelrazikâs arrest, detention, and torture in Sudan.
Today, Abdelrazik continues to struggle for justice, and is calling for his name to be removed from the 1267 UN terror watch list, a list basued not on law but on association and profiling administered by the UN Security Council, to which Abdelrazik was added at the request of the Bush administration without evidence or trial in 2006. Although Abdelrazik has returned to Canada, regular citizenship rights, including social services, education, and health care are not accessible to him due to Canadaâs enforcement of the UN 1267 list.
![<?php echo $config['site_title']; ?>](/static/images/rp-navimg.gif)
![Support the <?php echo $config['site_title']; ?>](/static/images/support.png)
