A Windsor woman claims female U.S. border agents at the customs checkpoint groped her. The 33-year-old, by the name of Leslie Ingratta, filed a claim in a U.S. District Court in Michigan. She said the sexual grouping was humiliating. She and two other Canadian women are suing the female U.S. border guards at the Detroit border crossing.
The allegations stated in the statement of claim have not been proven in court. According to the statement of claim, Ingratta stated she was subjected to “an invasive personal search by two female border guards who fondled her breasts and buttocks and stroked her groin”. After the incident, Ingratta stated one of the officers asked her if she was on a “booty call”.
Ingratta said she was let go after being searched and questioned by agents for two hours. All three women allege that they were unreasonably and improperly searched at the border in violation of the fourth amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Ingratta’s claim states that the search was contrary to standard Customs and Border Protection procedure.
Ingratta is seeking compensatory and punitive damage. Her Michigan based lawyer, Tom Wienner, has requested tapes from the waiting room. Ingratta states that she wants “people to know there was no reason for it”.
Read the full article here.
The CBC reports here that Monday night Bill C-10, the omnibus crime bill, will be voted on in the House of Commons. Amendments were made that would allow terrorists and their supporters to be sued. This bill is very controversial. One of the aspects of it that has been heavily criticized is the creation of mandatory minimum sentences for offences such as drug offences. The author of the aforementioned article, Meagan Fitzpatrick, writes:
They [mandatory minimum sentences] preclude judges from considering the specific circumstances of the offender and the offence and tie their hands, Arbour said. With marijuana-related offences, mandatory minimum sentences “go completely against the modern thinking by world leaders about the direction that the so-called war on drugs should take after 40 years of failure,” she said.
Imprisonment has a huge impact on a person’s civil liberties. Public security is also very important. The rights of the individual and the security of society have to be balanced. Whether this bill achieves balance or whether it impacts civil liberties too much is up for debate.
After a historic legal ruling in December 2011, in which the UK Court of Appeal ordered the UK government to request the release of Yunus Rahmatullah, a Pakistani man who has been held by the US without trial at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan for eight years, attempts at actually securing Rahmatullah’s release have officially failed. Lord Neuberger – the second most senior judge in England and Wales - had ordered the writ of habeas corpus to ensure Rahmatullah’s release, yet, yesterday, effectively accepted that matters could not progress after the Americans simply refused to hand him over. The Court ruled that it had no power, after all, to order the man’s release, with Neuberger publicly stating, “The melancholy truth is that the events since we handed down judgment appear to establish that when the UK defence forces handed over [Rahmatullah] to the US authorities in questionable circumstances in 2004 they most unfortunately appear to have sold the pass with regard to their ability to protect him in the future.” Ultimately, as Neuberger said, the court could not reach “beyond its jurisdiction” and that did not “extend to the US military authorities in Afghanistan.”
This incident has no doubt led to considerable controversy in the UK. Notably Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve – the legal charity that brought the habeas corpus petition – publicly stated: “Translated into plain English, what the judges are saying is that Britain committed what seems plainly to be a crime in 2004, but has now given up the power to release the victims from illegal detention”.
According to CBC news, “the U.S. government is seeking software that can mine social media to predict everything from future terrorist attacks to foreign uprisings, according to requests posted online by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”
Hundreds of intelligence analysts already sift overseas Twitter and Facebook posts to track events such as the Arab Spring. But in a formal “request for information’’ from potential contractors, the FBI recently outlined its desire for a digital tool to scan the entire universe of social media — more data than humans could ever crunch.
The Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence also have solicited the private sector for ways to automate the process of identifying emerging threats and upheavals using the billions of posts people around the world share every day.
[...]
The proposals already have raised privacy concerns among advocates who worry that such monitoring efforts could have a chilling effect on users. Ginger McCall, director of the open government project at the Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the FBI has no business monitoring legitimate free speech without a narrow, targeted law enforcement purpose.
“Any time that you have to worry about the federal government following you around peering over your shoulder listening to what you’re saying, it’s going to affect the way you speak and the way that you act,’’ McCall said.
The FBI has said that they only intend to track “publicly available information and would not focus on specific individuals or groups but on words related to criminal activity.”
For more coverage of this story see The Guardian.
The Globe and Mail reports here that eco-terrorists are seen as threats in the federal government’s new anti-terrorism strategy. While there may be fear of extreme environmentalists taking dangerous action against the Northern Gateway pipeline, environmentalists are concerned about their movement being linked with terrorism. It was argued that the strategy only targets groups that engage in terrorist acts and that legal dissent by environmentalists will still be tolerated. However, there has been criticism that this is an attempt to marginalize environmentalism. The anti-terrorism strategy seems to cast environmentalism in a negative light, which could possibly make it harder for environmentalists to be taken seriously.
In accordance with a European Court of Human Rights decision holding the UK could not deport Abu Qatada to Jordan for fear of denial of civil liberties and human rights violations, such as torture, immigration officials in the UK have released the Islamic cleric on bail after more than six years of detention without trial. This incident has caused a series of mixed reactions over the role of the European Court of Human Rights and the sometimes strained relationship between national security and due process and civil liberties. For a sense of this controversy, read more here; here; here; and here.
According to the CBC here, the federal government has told CSIS that it can use information that was possibly extracted under torture. The CBC reports:
The latest directive says in “exceptional circumstances” where there is a threat to human life or public safety, urgency may require CSIS to “share the most complete information available at the time with relevant authorities, including information based on intelligence provided by foreign agencies that may have been derived from the use of torture or mistreatment.”
In such rare circumstances, it may not always be possible to determine how a foreign agency obtained the information, and that ignoring such information solely because of its source would represent “an unacceptable risk to public safety.”
There has been criticism from opposition MPs and Amnesty International. The aforementioned CBC article quotes Jack Harris (NDP) in which he says, ”You’re indirectly supporting torture, encouraging torture, by making a statement that you’re prepared to continue on an ongoing basis dealing with countries that use torture as a matter of course.” The debate seems to come down to whether you believe that exceptional security concerns justify the use of tainted intelligence or that doing so is supporting the use of torture.
Le lundi 23 janvier 2012, la Chambre préliminaire II de la Cour pénale internationale a rendu sa décision concernant la confirmation des charges pesant sur six accusés de crimes contre l’humanité à l’égard de la présente situation en République du Kenya. D’ailleurs, lors d’une déclaration publique, le 24 janvier 2012, le procureur de la CPI aurait qualifié ce jugement de décision d’une importance capitale car établissant l’existence d’une responsabilité individuelle de trois des six accusés lors des violences ayant suivi les élections et la pacification du Kenya. En effet, la Chambre préliminaire II a confirmé les charges à l’encontre de MM. Ruto, Sang, Muthaura et Kenyatta et les a renvoyés devant les juges de première instance. Pour en savoir plus sur les chefs d’accusation, cliquez ici.
A navy sub-lieutenant, Jeffrey Delisle, has been charged with violating the Security of Information Act and breach of trust by a public officer under the Criminal Code of Canada.
The Chronicle Herald reported that, “[a]ccording to court documents sworn Monday by an RCMP officer from Montreal, investigators allege that between July 6, 2007, and Jan. 13, 2012, Delisle committed a breach of trust and communicated ‘to a foreign entity information that the Government of Canada is taking measures to safeguard.’ It is alleged that these offences were committed in Ottawa, Kingston, Ont., Halifax and Bedford. It has been further alleged that between Jan. 10 and Jan. 13 of this year in Halifax and Bedford, Delisle attempted to communicate classified information to a foreign entity.
On Tuesday, the accused’s lawyer urged the public not to jump to conclusions as to his clients guilt, reminding the crowd that presumption of innocence is a fundamental principle of the Canadian justice system.
Read more.
Several legal experts have commented on the case of United States v. Jones, currently awaiting decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. This case deals with the issue of whether police require a warrant for GPS tracking of a suspect. (see the November 8 post SCOTUS considers whether police need a warrant for GPS tracking).
At Jost on Justice, law professor Kenneth Jost highlights several of the justices’ concerns and calls the government’s defence in the case “Orwellian” and “scary in the extreme.”
At Time, Yale Law lecturer Adam Cohen speculates that the Court should and will “rule that the Fourth Amendment requires law enforcement to get a search warrant before they can install a GPS device on your car.”
At CNN, American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Catherine Crump outlines the significance of the case to privacy rights, saying that “the principle at stake [...] may well shape our privacy rights in the years and decades to come” and that “[anyone] who values privacy should hope that the Court ensures the government cannot use technological advances” in the way police did in this case.
At Law Technology News, lawyer Joshua Engel argues that the Court’s decision will turn on how it defines “search” and whether they will interpret GPS tracking to fall within that definition. Citing recent decisions and commentary by the Court during oral argument, he says that “it looks like the Court may rule that the police must obtain a warrant before using a GPS device to track a subject.”
For an extensive background and list of further legal and media commentary on this case, see the Electronic Privacy Information Centre.
