The federal government says it will report this week on whether it will heed a legislative committee’s recommendation that Canada overhaul its extradition act so that criminal suspects will be of less risk of abuse if they are returned to some countries, including India.
The justice and human-rights committee released a report in June titled Reforming Canada’s Extradition System, which the federal government is due to respond to by Thursday. The report recommends sweeping changes after hearing from observers, including Sikh associations in Canada, about how extradition law is a recurring tension.
The parliamentary committee report does not make specific recommendations about India, but it singles out that country as never having ratified the United Nations Convention against Torture.
The report urges the federal government to “undertake a comprehensive reform of the Extradition Act as soon as possible” and to “commission an independent review of all extradition treaties and identify partners with a history of serious human-rights violations.”
Canada and India have had an extradition treaty for 40 years, formalizing reciprocal legal processes to apprehend and return fugitives from justice so they can be put on trial in each others’ countries.
However, New Delhi has long contended that Canada is a safe haven for Sikh separatist militants. Observers say that Canada has long had to balance India’s criminal allegations against accounts that its state agents may torture, abuse or even kill prisoners.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement last month that Canada’s security agencies are investigating “credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen” will likely complicate future extradition bids even further, observers say.
“Great, great caution is called for in extraditing to India at all,” said Dalhousie University law professor Robert Currie in an interview Monday. “I would certainly be surprised if anybody would tolerate the idea of a Sikh person being extradited there at the moment.”
Prof. Currie, who has written extensively on the state of Canada’s extradition laws, said he is eager to learn how the federal government will respond to the justice committee’s recommendations.
The June report is urging that more rights-protecting language be written into the Extradition Act that Parliament passed in 1999. “The biggest one for me is the very final one of the committee’s recommendations, which is that it is time for a legislative overhaul here,” Prof. Currie said.
Ian McLeod, a spokesman for the Department of Justice, said the government has been examining the report and will “table its response by the applicable deadline” of Thursday.
Mr. McLeod said he would not reveal any statistics about how many bids for extradition India has filed nor how many Canada has rejected. “We cannot provide totals of extraditions by country due to potential privacy concerns and the potential for this information to reveal the existence of ongoing investigations.”
On Monday, a representative of the High Commission of India in Canada said it could not immediately respond to media inquiries. The press in India reported in September that only a handful of extraditions from Canada have ever been effected under the 1987 treaty that both countries signed.
Canadian government officials say they take steps to avoid sending any criminal suspect to a country where he or she may face abuse. “The minister [of justice] needs to make a determination about whether he should be ordering extradition at all. Sometimes, he determines it’s not appropriate to extradite in a particular circumstance,” Janet Henchey, director of the Justice Department’s international assistance group, told the legislative committee early this year.
During February’s hearings, the justice committee heard several witnesses say that Canada too often grants extradition requests.
“We submit that Canada should not have an extradition treaty with a country that has human-rights abuses or that has failed to ratify human-rights treaties,” Balpreet Singh of the World Sikh Organization said when he appeared. “As such, the India-Canada extradition treaty does not meet the necessary standards.”
Groups representing Sikh gurdwaras in Canada also filed a brief to the justice committee saying that police in India’s Punjab region are notorious for mistreating suspected Sikh activists. “Torture methods included electric shocks, tearing the legs apart at the waist and causing pelvic and muscle injury, and pulling out the hair and beard of the detainees, among other techniques,” that brief said.
In June, Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar was gunned down outside a Surrey, B.C., temple. In the years prior to the shooting India repeatedly accused him of terrorism offences. Mr. Trudeau was referring to the Nijjar case when he made his announcement. Canadian police have made no arrests in the case.
Colin Freeze