Hi all:
I attended Federal Court, 180 Queen St. W., 6th floor, with Mohamed and his translator today. The hearing was about an attempt by the Ministers lawyers to quash the subpoenas by M.’s lawyers to call former Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and Immigration Minister Diane Finley, (who must have signed security certificates) plus an assortment of deputy ministers and at least one former CSIS lawyer. The hearing actually took place in Ottawa and was televised from there as was our 3 images sent to Ottawa so the participants there could see us.
The Minister’s lawyers used every argument they could think of to prevent any of these potential witnesses from being called - calling the subpoena request an abuse of process. They said that the requests were not specific enough, that parliamentary privilege and lawyer-client privilege would prevent these witnesses from speaking. Judge Blanchard showed some frustration with the request for quashing of the defence request by saying that some previous CSIS witnesses at the last set of hearings this fall were not forthcoming with any information so wouldn’t it be good to have some witnesses that could shed some light on the security certificates. This all took two hours before the lunch break.
After lunch, I just stayed for one hour but M.’s defence – Y. Hameed, stated again why he wanted these witnesses called – they have first hand knowledge of the reasons they signed the security certificates. Judge Blanchard also challenged the defence on the redundancy of calling witnesses if there was already written testimony available. I’m sure I didn’t understand everything that was said and I did not have any sense for how the decision will go – at the time I left. I felt like Judge Blanchard was challenging the arguments of both sides about equally.
Please remember that the Mahjoub’s review of the ‘Reasonableness of the Security Certificate’ begins at 180 Queen St. on Monday, November 22, 2010 at 9:30 am. I hope we can have a good turnout at the beginning of these sessions.
I spoke this afternoon to Mary Foster who is on tour with Abousfian Abdelrazik in Saskatchewan and she suggested an idea that we try to either focus on having a good turnout one day of the week or have people pledge to attend on certain days. What do you think?
In order for Mohamed to be freed It is important for us to show an interest by attending the hearings even for one or two hours at a time.
See you in court
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