Mahjoub Hearing – Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Hi all:

I attended just this afternoon’s portion of today’s hearing. Mohamed told me that the main item arising from the morning was a revelation by the witness, a Mr. Flanagan, a CSIS manager, that CSIS had monitored telephone conversations between himself and his lawyers on a regular basis. Mohamed said that Judge Blanchard expressed some displeasure at this evidence. During a brief exchange that I heard in the afternoon a Public Counsel (Mohamed’s) lawyer described the morning testimony as amounting to ‘abuse of process’. The Minister’s Counsel, in his reply said this was an overstatement and that there was no evidence presented as to whether CSIS had ever used information that it had gleaned through this lawyer-client evesdropping. I couldn’t hear whether there will be any follow-up to this testimony.

Much of the 70 minutes of the afternoon hearing was spent on scheduling issues around having expert witness Dr. Fawaz A. Gerges, (Professor of Middle Eastern Politics and International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is an expert on Middle Eastern affairs), attend hearings – probably in January. An issue was how long he needed to come from England. The Public Counsel were ordered to have a firm schedule of witnesses by this Friday afternoon. Two potential witnesses mentioned were Mahmoud Jaballah and Mohamed Mahjoub.

The last issue had to do with a complaint by CBSA that Mohamed has breached one of his conditions by receiving up to 9 packages of documents couriered from his lawyers to him sometimes from Montreal since September. Under Court order ?, paragraph 9, CBSA has the right to examine any packages delivered to Mohamed but not ones coming from his lawyers. CBSA has demanded to see any packages delivered and Mohamed has refused, citing lawyer-client privilege. CBSA is proposing to send agents to Mohamed’s apartment every time he receives a package but Judge Blanchard said that if they do they are only to look upon the outside of the package to determine if it is from the lawyers and are not supposed to ever open said packages. He ordered both sides to resolve the issue within one week.

Judge Blanchard also announced that the Harkat decision will be delivered tomorrow – Thursday, December 9, 2010.

Court was adjourned with sitting to resume on Tuesday morning, 9:30 am, December 14, 2010 at Federal Court, 180 Queen St. W. (near Osgoode station), 6^th floor, room D.

Four friends of Mohamed were in attendance today. Please try to attend even if for a brief time.

Thanks to all