Ottawa — The Canada-U.S. consular notification agreement announced yesterday is less than meets the eye, Maher Arar and his supporters say.Despite the positive spin Ottawa is putting on it, ''nothing in this agreement would have changed what happened to me,'' said the Ottawa man, who was deported from the United States to his native Syria in October of 2002.
Mr. Arar, who says he was held in solitary confinement for 10 months and was tortured by the Syrians about U.S. claims that he belonged to the al-Qaeda terrorist group, said in a written statement yesterday that Canadians should not trust the agreement to protect their rights if they travel to the United States.
His concerns were echoed by human-rights groups on both sides of the border.
Prime Minister Paul Martin, who has said he wants to "get to the bottom" of what happened to Mr. Arar, announced the agreement yesterday after a breakfast meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush in Monterrey, Mexico, where they are attending the Summit of the Americas.
Asked yesterday about Mr. Arar's assessment of the agreement, Mr. Martin said he disagreed. "It would have absolutely changed the circumstances in which he was sent to Syria," he said.
The agreement provides for formal notification and speedy consultation before a Canadian is deported to a third country, but does not block such deportations.
"The agreement does not prevent the U.S. from deporting Canadians to third countries where they might face torture," Alex Neve, the secretary-general of the Canadian branch of Amnesty International said. "This agreement does not guarantee that there won't be another case like that of Maher Arar's."
Lorne Waldman, Mr. Arar's lawyer, noted that the announcement specifically acknowledges that countries have the right to deport foreign nationals to third countries. "To describe this as a breakthrough is clearly misleading."
He noted that Mr. Arar himself told Canadian consular officials that American authorities threatened to send him to Syria four days before they actually hustled him out of an immigration detention centre in New York in chains and sent him to the Middle East in the middle of the night.
"The problem wasn't that Canada didn't know this might happen," Mr. Waldman said. "The U.S. did it anyway."
Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham touted the agreement as an "unprecedented step," saying that no other country has such an understanding with the United States.
Mr. Neve said that in fact Washington has bilateral agreements with about 50 other countries to notify them if one of their citizens is arrested.
"Algeria, Fiji are on the [mandatory notification] list," Mr. Neve said.
"I'm surprised that Canada wasn't already on the list," he said.
The only new twist, he said, appears to be that the Americans will notify Canada not just about detentions but also about pending deportation hearings.
"The U.S.-Canada agreement is far from unprecedented," said Steven Watt of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. Mr. Watt is part of the legal team preparing a lawsuit on Mr. Arar's behalf against the U.S. government for civil-rights violations.
The Vienna Convention on consular relations requires the United States and other countries to tell foreign citizens they have the right to talk with consular officials from their own country when they have been arrested.
U.S. authorities have violated this right time and again, Mr. Neve said, including in cases where the arrested foreign national faced the death penalty.
Mr. Arar said he has received no reply yet from Mr. Martin about his request last month for a meeting with the new Prime Minister to explain why he wants a public inquiry to try to clear his name.
With a report from Drew Fagan in Monterrey, Mexico
