A bank account belonging to Abousfian Abdelrazik, the Canadian citizen ordered repatriated last year by a federal court judge who ruled the government had trampled on his constitutional rights, has been frozen.
“The fact that Caisse Desjardins froze my bank account indicates to me that I’m still in prison,” said Mr. Abdelrazik, who spent years in forced exile and prison in Sudan. “I don’t have the right to even have normal things like a bank account.”
Federal regulations require banks and other financial institutions to freeze accounts of anyone on the UN Security Council terrorist blacklist. Mr. Abdelrazik’s lawyers contend the regulations infringe on his rights. “It’s unconstitutional” to freeze his assets, Paul Champ said.
The account, with more than $10,000 in it, is Mr. Abdelrazik’s entire savings. It was the “inheritance from his deceased wife,” according to a statement from Project Fly Home, the group of ordinary citizens who defied federal law to pay for his plane ticket home last year.
Canadian law also makes it a crime to employ Mr. Abdelrazik, who returned to Montreal last June under armed RCMP escort after a federal court judge ruled the government couldn’t deny him the right to return home.
Mr. Justice Russel Zinn denounced the Canadian effort to enforce the blacklist on those who had never been charged nor knew what the allegations against them were as “untenable under the principles of international human rights.”
Mr. Abdelrazik has never been charged with a crime. He was cleared by both the RCMP and the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, who gave written assurances to ministers that there was no continuing reason to keep Mr. Abdelrazik on the UN 1267 blacklist of suspected al-Qaeda operatives.
However, the government’s request to have him removed from the blacklist was vetoed – apparently by the United States which added him to the list in 2006.
For years, the government denied Mr. Abdelrazik even a temporary passport to return home from a trip to Sudan, claiming it had to abide by the UN sanctions against al-Qaeda suspects, which include a travel ban and the seizure of all assets.
“Abousfian was imprisoned, tortured and stranded. The Federal Court found that CSIS was probably involved in the initial imprisonment,” said Maria Forti, a Project Fly Home spokeswoman. “It continues to impose sanctions that make it impossible for him to live an independent life.”
Mr. Abdelrazik is also suing the federal government for $27-million, an amount which – if awarded – would dwarf the record payout of $10-million given Maher Arar for Canada's involvement in his rendition to Syria by the United States.
In the Arar case, the RCMP falsely fingered him to U.S. anti-terrorist agents but played no role in his rendition to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured. In Mr. Abdelrazik’s case, it was Canadian agents apparently involved in his arrest in Sudan in 2003.
They also interrogated him in prison in Khartoum and – Mr. Abdelrazik’s lawyers argue – knew he would be tortured.
