Thank you, Chair.
Yes, I have tabled a motion to call the Minister of Public Safety before the committee to discuss the ever-increasing urgency of the situation at KIHC and the hunger strike that Hassan Almrei is engaging in. I believe today is day 153 of his hunger strike.
I know all members of the committee are aware that Mr. Almrei has never been charged and never been convicted. He's indefinitely detained under provisions of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that have been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Almost all of the conditions of his detention, which we've done a report on, for the most part are still unresolved, and those are the reasons he began this hunger strike 153 days ago.
Chair, members will be aware that there are different kinds of hunger strikes. There's a dry hunger strike, they call it, where people don't eat or drink any water, and that's not the kind that Mr. Almrei has been on. There's a total hunger strike where they drink nothing but water. Again, that's not the kind he's on. A partial hunger strike, which he has engaged in, where he's drinking nothing but orange juice and water at this point, is extremely dangerous at the time of 150 days. I guess the closest examples are from hunger strikers in the Turkish prison system, where many hunger strikers who were on a similar diet of lemon juice and water, and some salt as well, began to die at around day 150. So it is a very, very serious juncture in that.
The issue we raised in our report around solitary confinement is also an acute issue at this point, given that Mr. Almrei is the only prisoner detained at KIHC. There is a lot of research on the effects of solitary confinement, whether that be punitive solitary confinement--and I think we would agree that isn't, in some sense, what Mr. Almrei is facing--or administrative solitary confinement, which happens for reasons other than discipline of the detainee. No matter what kind of solitary confinement it is, the psychological effects of that are extremely acute, particularly in the situation where the detainee doesn't know the charge against him, doesn't know the length of detention. Certainly that's the situation Mr. Almrei is in at the current time.
I think it's a matter of extreme urgency that we have the minister before us to put questions about this.