ZUNDEL UPDATE -- HEARINGS RESUME APRIL 13
There's been a flurry of activity recently in the Zundel
case. Tuesday, April 13, Mr. Zundel's certificate review hearing resumes
before former CSIS boss and now the judge of CSIS evidence in this case,
Mr. Justice Pierre Blais. The court is at 361 University Avenue in Toronto
and the hearing begins at 9:00 a.m.
Look for some exciting testimony in the next few days,
lawyer Peter Lindsay advises. Ernst Zundel will again be on the stand.
Not such good news was delivered to Mr. Zundel by the
Federal Court of Appeal in a judgment appropriately enough dated April 1
-- April Fool's Day. The Court of Appeals turned down Mr. Zundel's appeal
against a decision in January by Mr. Justice Blais to deny Mr. Zundel's
request for the names of all "CSIS and RCMP officers as well as any
other public servants of Canada, who interviewed Mr. Zundel or others
about him, including date of interview and whether any such record is
available." Such information had been disclosed to the accused in
several of the other national certificate cases winding their way through
the courts.
At the heart of this appeal is the fact that Mr. Justice
Blais' decision will be final. It cannot be appealed and, if it finds that
the certificate alleging that Mr. Zundel is a terrorist and, therefore a
threat to national security, is "reasonable" -- he doesn't have
to find that the absurd allegations are true -- then the certificate
becomes a deportation order. Mr. Zundel's appeal sought to overturn
"interlocutory" decisions by the judge; in other words, he
attempted to question the judgment or fairness of certain procedures.
No, says the Federal Court of Appeal: Not only is the
judge's final decision unappealable, but any decisions along the way are
also final. "The fact that the designated judge's decision regarding
the disclosure of evidence to Mr. Zundel was part of the ultimate
determination into the reasonableness of the certificate under subsection
80(1) and as a result, cannot be appealed pursuant to subsection 80(3) is
also supported by the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in Canada
(Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v. Tobiass."
Naturally, the Court of Appeal also refused to stay the
proceedings. Peter Lindsay, Mr. Zundel's lead counsel, is not discouraged.
"Well, now they say the lack of the right to appeal covers all the
steps toward the decision. The defendant now has even fewer rights. There
are secret hearings, there's no right to appeal against the final decision
and now there's no interlocutory right of appeal. This is a good clean
legal issue for an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada," the
combative counsel concludes.
In another development, Deputy Prime Minister and the
minister in charge of security and public safety, Anne McLellan, was
ambushed on Monday, April 5, at a meeting of German-American businessmen
in Edmonton. A questioner confronted her and declared: "It's shameful
what's been done to Ernst Zundel," referring to his year-long
incarceration in solitary confinement and the bogus accusations that he's
a terrorist.
Miss McLellan was in full retreat. She pack-pedaled
furiously and alibied: "I did not swear out the certificate." In
a major reversal of the diffident, some may say meek and cowardly
behaviour of so many Germans in Canada when their rights are being taken
away, the audience loudly applauded the questioner.
Mr. Zundel has been avidly following from prison the spate
of apparent "anti-Semitic" incidents -- the e-mailing, the
knocked over Jewish tombstones, the graffiti and, most recently, the
firebombing of the library of a Jewish school in Montreal. He believes
that some, if not all, of these incidents are hoaxes. He points to the
fact that the press hysteria over this wave of seeming
"anti-Semitism" has all but drowned out the good publicity his
case was getting in the Globe and Mail, where Kirk Makin's articles and
editorial were focusing on the unfairness of the secret hearings. The hype
about what amounts, with the exception of the arson attack, to petty
vandalism has also neatly taken attention away from Israel's latest wave
of assassinations, mostly unarmed and infirm seniors, in Palestine.
Mr. Zundel points to Markus Wolf. "He was Jewish and
the head of the East German STASI (secret police). He returned from Moscow
with his parents in 1945 on a Soviet tank. After the fall of the Wall, it
was revealed that Wolf and his STASI initiated the painting of a Cologne
synagogue with swastikas and the toppling of Jewish tombstones in
Frankfurt in 1959-60." These outrages were, of course, attributed to
so-called "neo-Nazis." "In fact, they were instigated by
the communist STASI. That got Germany their its 'hate laws" which
have strangled the German resistance," Mr. Zundel explained to me
when I saw him at the Metro West Detention Centre on April 9.
Paul Fromm
Director
CANADIAN ASSOCIATION FOR FREE EXPRESSION
