“Torture, execution and four-by-six-foot prison cells” were just a few of the words used last week to describe the personal experiences of four panel speakers who are seeking to sue the countries and perpetrators that abused their human rights.
The panel was speaking at the event “From Words to Action,” a forum hosted last Friday by the Law Faculty’s International Human Rights Program. Noah Novogrodsky, the program’s director, said “I wish there was no need for a panel on torture. In an era of globalization, we are finally connected to the rest of the planet for better or for worse. Sadly, the bad manifests itself in the torture of our loved ones.”
The speakers wanted to answer the question: “after illegal torture, what legal recourse is possible?”
The four panelists are fighting for change in the Canadian justice system. Under Canada’s state immunity laws, Canada cannot intervene in the legal actions of another country: “a foreign state is immune from the jurisdiction of any court in Canada,” one speaker said, in order to maintain foreign diplomacy. Another said that the federal government is afraid that “it will open the flood gates. The courts will be clogged with open cases.”
“Justice is a right, not a privilege,” said Houshang Bolzari, an Iranian immigrant who was tortured in Iran. “It should not be about citizenship but discrimination. Canada cannot sit passively at the sidelines.”
Ken Wiwa, the human rights activist, author, and son of Ken Saro Wiwa, the nobel-prize-nominated writer and activist who was executed by the Nigerian government in 1995, decried the “homogenization and destruction of the [Nigerian] environment as a morality tale for the late 20th century, where poor people live in rich land,” and genocide is allowed to rage on so that foreign companies can reap the profits.
“How can we hold multinationals responsible when the world is divided in state confederates?” asked Wiwa, who has been embroiled in a long legal battle with Shell Oil over what he says was its complicity in his father’s death. “The Nigerian government is subservient to Shell. Today, oil prices have risen to US$50 a barrel because of a threat, stating that all multinationals must leave [Nigeria] today or fires will be set.” Non-violent protests were used before, he said, but today, “violence is the only way to settle disputes with an international agenda. Foreign powers don’t care about human rights. Rights are secondary to the agenda.”
Dr. William Sampson, a Canadian who was wrongly imprisoned in a Saudi Arabian jail for 3 years, said that torture survivors are often medically ravaged from physical and psychological trauma at the hands of their tormentors. “Yet the government denies us the right to seek redress and to call to account those who torture us,” he said. “It is not in our place to question government policy. Yet, they engage in hostage negotiation, behind the scenes, which is illegal by government laws. The Canadian government was complicit with that.”
Hachem Kazemi, son of tortured and murdered Canadian photo-journalist Zahra Kazemi, criticized the “Bush Regime” in the US and the state of human rights in Iran, where there are currently about 30,000 political prisoners.
“Laws against torture do not exist,” he said. “There is a lie that life in Iran is not so bad to make the world believe there is a democracy in Iran, but it is a rumour that becomes a myth.”
Bolzari concluded that financial restitution will not only provide closure and a sense of retribution for individual torture survivors, but will also “make torture impossible by making it expensive. Lawsuits hurt by aiming at [the country’s] pockets.”
