First of all, the public court hearings on
the Stay of Proceedings for Mahjoub
ended today, so there is no court tomorrow – Wed. April 25. There
are some further procedures but they are between the two lawyers and Justice
Blanchard.
Again today there was a good turnout of
traditional supporters of Mr. Mahjoub including some from Toronto Action for
Social Change and No One Is Illegal. I thought it was somewhere in the high
teens with different people coming and going all day . Some even came all the
way from Durham, Kitchener-Waterloo and London. Adding to the court presence
were journalists from CBCTV, City TV, French CBC and others including a private
blogger who were there for the 1 pm media event outside the courtroom with some
remaining for the afternoon session.
Arguing for Ministers Counsel was Don
McIntosh and for public Counsel, Paul Slansky. Because there seem to be many
fine points of law argued from cases cited and it is difficult to hear some
speakers in the courtroom including Justice Blanchard I am not going to go into
great detail. Mr. McIntosh spoke first and argued that there should be no Stay
of Proceedings based on speculation about the commingled documents, which Mr.
Slansky later said was a misinterpretation
of ‘speculation’ in the case law. Mr. McIntosh also argued that there is not
overwhelming evidence of ‘the abuse of process’ that affects Mr. Mahjoub. Mr.
McIntosh took Mr. Slansky’s arguments of yesterday for a Stay of Proceedings
and attempted to refute each argument. He concluded that there is insufficient
prejudice to Mr. Mahjoub to warrant a Stay. He cited some cases that
represented greater crimes for which evidence was collected unlawfully and yet
there was no Stay granted. He repeated the SIR’s (Security Intelligence Review)
allegations against Mr. Mahjoub (all of which have been debunked as unprovable
by past witnesses and for which there is obviously not enough evidence to stand
up in a regular court of law) as requiring the continuation of the
‘Reasonableness of the Security Certificates hearings’ which began in 2008.
Mr. Slansky’s response was that ‘Prejudice is the only factual issue here with
no evidentiary burden on Mr. Mahjoub but on the Department of Justice’. He
continued that the remedy for Mr. Mahjoub must address the prejudice. We don’t
know the extent of the prejudice because the Justice Department apparently
failed to even have a ‘sign-in’ sheet to a secured room so that they could know
who had seen the documents. And someone photocopied documents and then failed
to admit that until later when such copyying was forbidden by Prothontary
Aalto.
Justice Blanchard questioned the adequacy
of the summaries prepared by P. Aalto’s delegates and apparently wants to see
the assessment of prejudice chart that Mr. Slansky referred to yesterday and
perhaps wants to see the boxes of documents for himself. This is not clear to
me.
There was some discussion over a letter by
Mr. McIntosh that Mr. Slansky said Mr. McIntosh had reversed himself on. Both
sides were asked to make a written submission to the court by next Tuesday with
some kind of responses on Wednesday but this is not for the public. So the Stay
hearing is not actually finished as of today and we don’t know when there will
be a decision.
At 1 pm a media event (the media people
mentioned earlier) took place outside 180 Queen St. with Mr. Slansky and Mr.
Mahjoub speaking and answering questions of the media. I will not attempt to
quote Mr. Mahjoub but one thing Mr. Slansky said was that a failure of the
court to grant a Stay of Proceedings would be a ‘travesty of justice’.
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