WASHINGTON — More than a dozen members of Congress, prominent religious leaders and thousands of non-violent U.S. protesters could be barred from Canada if border agents consistently applied the same criteria they used to turn back two anti-war protesters last week.
California Democrat Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, chairman of the House of Representatives foreign affairs committee and co-chair of the congressional human-rights caucus, is among the most prominent who might be barred.
Mr. Lantos, along with four other members of Congress were arrested for precisely the same sort of non-violent protest deemed by Canadian border guards to be enough to turn back anti-war activists Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink, and Ann Wright, a former diplomat.
Like hundreds of others at various times, Mr. Lantos was arrested in April, 2006, outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington where he was protesting against the genocide in Darfur. At least 12 members of Congress have been similarly arrested in Darfur protests.
Related Articles
Ms. Benjamin was arrested a month earlier at the U.S. mission to the United Nations in New York while presenting a petition signed by 150,000 opposing the Iraq war.
Both paid $50 fines, both arrests were misdemeanours, a type of minor offence.
In Ottawa, Chris Williams, a spokesman for the Canada Border Safety Agency, declined to say whether the convictions of Mr. Lantos or the other congressmen makes them inadmissible to Canada.
“I can't answer your question with a blanket statement,” he wrote in an e-mail exchange. “Any traveller to Canada, it is up to them to satisfy the CBSA officer that they are a genuine visitor coming to Canada for a temporary purpose.”
Embassy and border officials reportedly told Ms. Benjamin and Ms. Wright that their criminal past – records of the fines they paid for trespass were on an FBI computer database made available to Canadian border guards – made them inadmissible.
Mr. Williams said acts that would be crimes in Canada are sufficient reason to bar would-be visitors. But Paul Copeland, a veteran immigration lawyer in Toronto, thinks the border guards got it wrong. In a telephone interview Monday, he said there is no federal Criminal Code offence that is an equivalent to the U.S. misdemeanour of trespass, and the anti-war activists shouldn't have been barred on those grounds.
“I don't think there is any legal basis to keep them out,” Mr. Copeland said Monday. “We should have welcomed them,” he added.
Among others who might be barred if Canadian border guards applied the policy consistently is the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was convicted of misdemeanour trespass for protesting outside a gun shop.
42
