The Canadian Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of their anti-terrorism law today, after a challenge by a Pakistani-Canadian sentenced to life for his role a failed London bombing sought to challenge it.
The Anti-Terrorism Act was passed in late 2011 and dramatically expanded the powers of the Canadian government as well as enormously broadening the definition of terrorism. The law makes it terrorism to commit any act or threaten to do anything for “political, religious, or ideological reasons” which might conceivably cause harm or property damage, or interfere with any government service deemed “critical.” It also empowered to government to make “preventative arrests” of people who conceivably might commit such crimes.
Though the act has only been invoked a handful of times in the past decade, rights groups say it has violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and would oblige the government, if taken at face value, to arrest all non-violent protesters whose demonstrations might interfere with any government’s operations, and would have obliged the arrest of protest leaders like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela as “terrorists.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling dismissed concerns about the broadness of the law, insisting it was obvious that no Canadian government would ever criminalize “legitimate expression” and that terrorism is a bad thing and therefore a harsh law against it was warranted.
"The law makes it terrorism to commit any act or threaten to do anything for “political, religious, or ideological reasons” which might conceivably cause harm or property damage, or interfere with any government service deemed “critical.”
Unless, of course, such acts are done on behalf of the government by people in government.
Such is life these days in the land to the North, NeoConlandia……………….
"democracy" under monarcy is oxyMoron.
Sending troops trained to murder people in far off lands is terrorism in the guise of humanitaran interventation is bound to have blowback these learned judges are not aware of this.
The law broadens the definition of terrorism? I thought the definition of terrorism had been simplified – terrorist = Muslim.
The terrorism law is, no longer, disputed. It can, now, only be changed or stricken by an act of Parliament.
The Justices, some of them, did caution the government in proper exercise of its authority.
But the most telling feature remains the ability to arrest and detain outside the 'due process' of law where the authorities claim a requirement of 'security' to preclude public production of evidence to warrant charges.
Again, too, the provision of conviction upon self-incrimination, with no necessity to present evidence in open court, is retained.
Short history of the "Star Chamber"
Habeas corpus has been abandoned for the outcasts of the [NEW] [WORLD???] order in both the US and the UK, secret courts have been created to hear secret evidence, guilt has been inferred by association, torture and rendition nakedly justified (in the UK our government's lawyers continue to argue positively for the right to use the product of both) and vital international conventions consolidated in the aftermath of the Second World War – the Geneva Convention, the Refugee Convention, the Torture Convention – have been deliberately avoided or ignored.
It is the bitterest of ironies that John Lilburne, the most important organizer of the rights we in this country and the United States claim and on which our respective constitutions, written and unwritten, were built, achieved this in large part as a consequence of his having been himself subjected to torture, to accusations based on secret evidence and heard by a secret court, to being shackled and held in extremes of isolation which exposed him nevertheless to public humiliation and condemnation.
The worst excesses of the last ten years, which destroyed the certainties of those hard-won rights, should have sounded loud alarms, not least because of that precise historical parallel; one key in attempting to hang on to legal and moral concepts under attack is to remember their origin.
Lilburne, an intractable young Puritan, with a strong sense of his rights as a freeborn Englishman and a smattering of law, in 1637 was summoned before the Court of Star Chamber – a court comprising nothing more than a small committee of the Privy Council, without a jury, empowered to investigate. Lilburne had recently been in Holland and was charged, o n the basis of information from an informant, with sending loosely defined "fatuous and scandalous" religious books to England. His defence was straightforward: “I am clear I have sent none.” Thereafter he refused to answer questions based on allegations kept secret from him as to his association with others suspected of involvement in the sending of the books: “I think by the law of the land that I may stand upon my just defence, and that my accusers ought to be brought face to face to justify what they accuse me of.” For his refusal, he was fined 500 pounds, a fortune for an apprentice, and was lashed to a cart and whipped thought the streets of London from Fleet to Westminster.
Lilburne was locked in a pillory in an unbearable posture (in today’s terminology a “stress position”), but yet exhorted all who would listen to resist the tyranny of the bishops, repeating biblical texts to the crowd applicable to the wrongs done to him and their rights. On being required to incriminate himself: “No man should be compelled to be his own executioner.” He survived two and a half years in Fleet prison, gagged and kept in solitary confinement, shackled and starving. The first act of the Long Parliament in November 1642 was to set him free, to abolish the Court of Star Chamber and to adopt a resolution that its sentence was “illegal and against the liberty of the subject, and also bloody, cruel, wicked, barbarous and tyrannical.”
Above entirely lifted from: http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/105/why-we-tort…. One parenthetical insert in caps by me….. EVERYONE HERE SHOULD BE CONVERSANT ON THE ABOVE..!!