Mr. Speaker, I rise to present a petition signed by concerned citizens across the country concerned about Canadian citizen and academic Hassan Diab, who was extradited to France in 2014 in a case widely viewed as a wrongful conviction in the making. He has been detained since then in France for questioning based on anonymous intelligence allegations, possibly gleaned from torture. In 2016, a French judge found consistent evidence supporting Hassan's innocence, concluding that he could not have been present in France at the time of the crime, and in May and again in October 2016, the judge ordered Hassan's release on bail, finding no grounds for his further detention. Yet he has been jail or on electronic monitoring for over eight years.
These citizens are calling on the government to do everything it can to obtain Hassan's release and return to Canada, and to intervene with the French authorities to act as soon as possible.