I think the first two pages were dealing with the type of review that the government was going to mandate, but what will interest this committee is the following.
I write, “And what, sir, is so very wrong with the current Extradition Act?” Then there are numbered paragraphs. The first is: “1.The Act unfairly deprives liberty” and goes on to explain how, and, “2. The unsworn allegation of the foreign official is “presumed” to be “reliable evidence”.
The Diab case showed the folly of such a presumption. For example, in Diab, the foreign official said, even though he knew it was untrue because he was in charge of the file, that there was no fingerprint that the French had found on the bomber's hotel sign-in card. He wrote the record of the case in late 2008 and early 2009. In 2007, the French had located an identifiable print on that card. They had excluded Hassan Diab as the source, so not only is it folly to, as Dean La Forest says in her extensive assessment of this act, rely on second and third hand hearsay; we can't even trust a long-time ally to tell us the truth.
That wasn't the only thing we weren't told. There were multiple other fingerprints that excluded this man. When the bomber was arrested, in almost a cartoon event, shoplifting pliers before the bombing, he was taken to the police station. The police didn't take a photograph of him. They took a statement from him. He filled out the statement and signed it. They found 16 fingerprints on that. Ten of them were identified as those of the police who handled the document. Of the six unidentified, none match Hassan Diab.
All of that did not appear in the record of the case. This invites this system whereby some foreign official who can't be cross-examined and doesn't have to swear that this is true. He simply certifies that this is evidence we have, but he doesn't tell the truth and he doesn't tell the whole truth.