Canadian ISIL suspect with ties to Chatham could settle in Ottawa after repatriation

Sigh… An overly sympathetic treatment of an apparent ISIL member, UK born and raised, whose UK citizenship revocation allowed the UK government to “offload” him to Canada, despite his having never lived here. While I understand the desire of parents to do everything for their son, government should appeal this particular case (a Canadian is a Canadian need not necessarily be deemed a Canadian in cases such as this):

An activist working with the family of an alleged terrorist connected to Chatham and held for the past five years in Syria says Jack Letts could wind up living in Ottawa with his mother if he’s brought back to Canada.

Letts, a former British national nicknamed “Jihadi Jack” by the media there, is one of four Canadian men a court ruled last week must be repatriated to Canada. Stripped of his U.K. citizenship by the British government for alleged ties to ISIL, the Oxford-born Letts still retains a Canadian citizenship through his father, who is originally from the Chatham-Kent region but now lives in England.

Matthew Behrens, an advocate with the group Stop Canadian Involvement In Torture, which has been working with the Letts family on their repatriation efforts, said the “hope is that he will join his mom in Ottawa”He said Letts’ mother, Sally Lane, moved to the nation’s capital a few years ago after her son was stripped of his British citizenship. Behrens said Lane decided to move to Ottawa to maintain pressure on the Canadian government to bring her son home “because Jack is a Canadian citizen who has a right to return here.”

Behrens said supporters hope Letts and the other three men will be repatriated by Feb. 15, the second anniversary of the Global Declaration Against Arbitrary Detention. He added that Canadian-authored declaration was signed into existence “ostensibly to bring home the two Michaels” – Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, who were detained in China for nearly three years for questionable reasons.

The Canadian government, Behrens said, “completely ignored” those principles when dealing with the four men imprisoned by Kurdish forces in northeast Syria.Behrens, who was in the courtroom when Justice Henry Brown ruled the four male prisoners must be repatriated, said the judge’s decision required the detainees to be brought back as soon as reasonably possible.

“The judge said that in the context of reminding the government that the conditions of the women and children were bad enough, but that the conditions of the men are worse. He called them dire,” the activist said.Brown’s decision was the result of a court action launched in 2021 by the Letts family and the family members of the other Canadians detained in this Kurdish prison. Lawyers struck an agreement on Jan. 19 for the federal government to retrieve six women and 13 children held in captivity, but not the four men, none of whom were named, except for Letts.

Then on Jan. 20, Brown ruled the four men must also be returned to Canada, citing the mobility rights section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which says every citizen “has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada.”

Brown noted in his ruling the men were in custody because the Kurds suspected they were part of ISIL. The judge, though, said federal government lawyers did not allege in court that “any of the (Canadians) engaged in or assisted in terrorist activities.”

“Canadians are entitled to have political opinions, no matter how abhorrent they may be to other Canadians,” the judge wrote in his decision. He said the line is crossed when they actually commit crimes, but “there is no evidence to that effect before this court.”

Source: Canadian ISIL suspect with ties to Chatham could settle in Ottawa after repatriation