Thank you.
My name is Matthew Behrens. I represent the group Women Who Choose to Live, which works with women who are criminalized and punished for trying to survive male violence. I've worked on extradition cases for over 20 years, largely with the families and those who have been victimized by a process that is fundamentally flawed and violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on many levels.
Today I'm very honoured to be here with Rania. We're here to talk about the human face of extradition and the consequences of this fundamentally flawed Extradition Act.
This act has been used as a bludgeon to batter abused women, as in the cases of M.M. and K.T. It has led to the potential for and actual torture of Canadian citizens, as in the Boily case. Mr. Boily was recently awarded $500,000 for the minister's complicity in his torture in an extradition to Mexico case. It's also been a back door to forcibly remove people who are in need of protection to states where they had fled from persecution.
I'm happy to address broader issues related to the case, but I'd specifically like to tell you the story of one of the most significant extradition cases in the last 20 years.
This is Michele Messina. She can't be here today because she took her life at the age of 58 in a Quebec prison in November 2019 after having spent nine years fighting extradition. Michele is not here because she lost her life in that prison. She took her life because she was so afraid of being extradited back to Georgia, where she knew she would not get a fair trial for the charges of rescuing her children from clear signs of abuse from a very abusive man.
In 2010 she rescued her three dual-citizen children from Georgia and brought them here for safety. All the children are now adults. Over a decade ago they were sleeping in an abandoned garage to escape their father's abuse. Now they've been orphaned, because Canada chose to decide that it would criminalize Michele in the same way the State of Georgia had as well.
Her initial extradition was quashed in the Superior Court of Quebec. On appeal, it was reinstated. Then we went up to the Supreme Court, where Michele lost in a 4:3 decision, which the dissenting judges actually said was Kafkaesque.
We initiated a campaign for reconsideration. There was a new government in 2015. Jody Wilson-Raybould actually brought in a reconsideration, but after seven months, she signed what turned out to be the death writ for Michele. The minister's reasons were infused with a complete lack of knowledge about the consequences and dynamics of violence against women. She asked questions in these reasons, such as, “Why didn't Michele report to the police?” How many times have survivors been asked that ridiculous question?
In the end, Wilson-Raybould said that, far from saving these children, what had happened was she had taken away the abusive father's rights to visit them. That was the conclusion of the justice minister. That tells us where the real fault lines are with respect to gender-based violence and the Extradition Act.
Justice Rosalie Abella wrote the dissenting opinion in that Supreme Court decision. She pointed out that “the defence of rescuing children to protect them from imminent harm does not exist in Georgia, the mother will not be able to raise the defence she would have been able to raise had she been prosecuted in Canada.”
This contradiction violates a cornerstone of extradition law, the double criminality requirement that the Supreme Court acknowledges is a process that ensures that Canada is “not embarrassed by an obligation to extradite a person who would not, according to its own standards, be guilty of acts deserving punishment.”
I think part of the problem we're facing here is that we are dealing with government departments, and especially the so-called international assistance group, which works on the extradition cases at the Department of Justice, that have failed to enter the 21st century when it comes to gender-based analysis. They were mandated to do so in 2010. In 2021 the supplementary mandate letters to the minister specifically spoke about something called “gender-based analysis plus”. Gender-based analysis plus would involve “critical consideration of the historical, social, and political contexts and the systems of power, privilege, discrimination and oppression that create inequities as well as applying a meaningful approach to address them.”
If that had been meaningfully applied in Michele's case, she might be here today to testify about extradition instead of being in a grave that her children can only visit.
It's critical, I think, when we're looking at extradition that we recognize what gender-based analysis plus is about because, as you're probably familiar with, there's that wonderful quote from Anatole France, where he said, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”