If I could just add one recent example of how important that is, in the Arar case itself, the government withheld 1,500 words, and we went to court and got 500 more words. The 500 words we got were not words that anyone who looked at them after the fact thought were reasonably protected on national security grounds, but they were words that were highly embarrassing to the RCMP and the government. They failed to tell the justice of the peace who was doing a search warrant that the information they were relying on might have been obtained under torture and things like that. So that's why we think it's extremely important that the judge have that discretion.
You asked for other amendments. We could go through them. We think it's important that in the bill itself you include clear criteria for the selection of special advocates. It will make the system far more credible in the eyes of the public if you put in the bill that special advocates have to be lawyers. That's not even in the bill now. They have to have 10 years' experience. They have to have trial experience.
The other thing that would be in the bill is that the person have an option of electing, if he so chooses, from a list of special advocates. I would say it would make the bill more credible if you put in the bill that there has to be adequate support available to special advocates so they can properly exercise their function. The concern we have now is if it's not included in the bill, you're going to appoint special advocates, and they're not going to be able to do their job properly.
We've touched on the relationship between special advocates, we've touched on tortured evidence, and we think one of the other key issues that hasn't really been addressed is the question of limits to indefinite detention. The way the bill is drafted now, you could be under a security certificate forever. What happens is if you can't be deported because you're going to be tortured, you can't be sent away, but you could still be detained.
So we think it's important that at a certain point, when there's a decision that you can't be deported because you're going to be subject to torture and the courts or the government decide that makes it impossible, then the certificate has to allow for release, which would mean the government would have to choose other options to deal with the person. You can't have indefinite detention under an immigration process when deportation is no longer possible.