Posted by admin on Apr 18th, 2007
CBC News, 18 April 2007Â
Lawyers for a former Algerian air force lieutenant who spent nearly five years in American custody — despite being cleared by the FBI — are calling for an inquiry into Canada’s role in his detention. “I can’t go on living like this. I need clarification … why I was treated in such a way,” Benamar Benatta said during a news conference in Toronto Wednesday.
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Posted by admin on Feb 18th, 2007
URGENT SUPPORT NEEDED FOR AMIR KAZEMIAN! Rally on Monday Feb 19 at CIC office, 300 West Georgia at 9am.
This is an URGENT email asking you to support Amir Kazemian. Amir is an Iranian refugee who has been in sanctuary at St. Michael’s Church in Vancouver since June 2004 – that is 2 years and 8 months. On the evening of Saturday, February 17th, Amir was arrested and detained by the Vancouver City Police and is being held in detention by Canadian Border Services Agency.
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Posted by admin on Feb 16th, 2007
Toronto Star, 16 February 2007. Michelle Shephard Rick Westhead
A 9-year-old Canadian boy is in a Texas detention centre after his flight to Toronto made an unscheduled stop and U.S. officials detained his family. Now the boy’s Iranian parents are pleading with Canadian officials to help secure the family’s release from the immigration holding facility, which has come under fire for allegedly detaining children in sub-standard conditions.
“All the time he is asking me, `Why am I wearing the uniform? Why I am here?'” the boy’s mother said, as she sobbed during a telephone interview from the detention facility yesterday. “We didn’t do nothing. My child is innocent.”
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Posted by admin on Jan 15th, 2007
Haitian dismayed by detention, allegations. Don Lajoie Windsor Star Monday, January 15, 2007
A former Haitian parliamentarian, arrested and detained for 15 days at the Windsor jail upon arriving at the border to seek political asylum, says he was “first surprised” then “dismayed” to learn that the political lies in his homeland had followed him to Canada. In his first interview since being released Dec. 28, Jean Candio, elected as deputy in the parliament of ousted Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide in 2000, said he had reason to believe he would be welcomed in Canada, at least as a refugee, when he arrived Dec. 13. Instead, Candio was arrested by Canadian Border Service Agency (CBSA) officers and hauled to Windsor’s jail, where he languished for two weeks on allegations of terrorist affiliations in Haiti.
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Posted by admin on Dec 20th, 2006
“An Aberrationâ€: Voice from the Laval Immigration Detention Center in Montreal
Let us speak of freedom! Does it really exist in the proper sense of the word? In a country that claims no torture, or executions, where hidden racism and the hypocrisy of disguised torture work to silence through psychological pressure, where immigrants are treated as imported goods, where domestic animals are better treated and respected than humans – humans with the right to live in full dignity and express themselves?
It is a freedom stained with injustice, especially the injustice facing immigrants who wait for regularization, who are locked up in the Laval Immigration Prevention Centre as Immigration uproots and destroys family lives and displaces immigrants in handcuffs like real criminals.
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