MONTREAL — An international anti-Semitism conference Nov. 7 to 9 in Ottawa will likely adopt a “protocol” to add to the declaration that emerged at a similar meeting in London last year, Liberal MP Irwin Cotler said.
Irwin Cotler
“That’s what we’re expecting,” Cotler, the Liberals’ special counsel on human rights and international justice, said at a Sept. 2 press conference at his Mount Royal riding office.
At the inaugural Conference and Summit of the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism established in February 2009, signatories to the London Declaration called on their respective governments and the United Nations “never to allow” international institutions to be used to give anti-Semitism legitimacy.
About 120 parliamentarians from 40 countries are expected in Ottawa, as was the case at the inaugural conference, Cotler said.
The former justice minister said Bloc Québécois representatives are also expected to participate. Last year, the Bloc pulled out of a Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism (CPCCA) inquiry on anti-Semitism because the CPCCA declined to accept submissions from the Canadian Arab Federation and Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East.
“I work closely with the Bloc on many issues regarding civil liberties,” Cotler said. “I believe they will be present [at the Ottawa conference].”
Cotler used his meeting with reporters to lambaste Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government on a number of issues, including “mismanaging” taxpayers’ money, “silencing dissidents,” planning abolition of the gun registry and of the mandatory long form of the census, and to outline his own agenda for the coming parliamentary session.
He also responded to journalists’ queries about the case of Lori Douglas, the prominent Manitoba justice now embroiled in a sex scandal that involved nude photos of her online. Douglas was appointed by Cotler in 2005 when he was justice minister.
Cotler said that a judicial advisory committee had already vetted Douglas before he made the appointment. He had made his recommendation, he stressed, based on that committee’s approval of her.
“By the time it [came] to me after preliminary vetting, it’s not the minister who does the checking,” Cotler said.
Douglas would have been asked whether anything existed in her background that could “bring the administration of justice into disrepute,” he said, and “I presume either she did not know what went [online] and said nothing, or she did know and did not answer correctly…
“I can only tell you that the matter never arose when the appointment process came before me.”
Cotler said his initiatives for the forthcoming parliamentary session include motions to have the government declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a “terrorist entity”; to re-establish the Court Challenges Program set up in 1994 to provide financial assistance for important court cases that advance language and equality rights; and to support a national legal aid program.
He will be pursuing second reading of his private member’s bills: the Sudan Accountability Act (C-204) and the Iran Accountability Act (C-412) to combat Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s incitement to genocide and planned nuclear armament of the country.
“These should be government bills,” Cotler said, adding that the government should be imposing and enforcing sanctions.
Cotler called on the government to seek the release of imprisoned Iranian human rights activist Shiva Nazar-Ahari, “whose only ‘crime’ is to be spokesperson for the Iranian media organization Human Rights Reporting in Iran.”
Asked his opinion of a law that would publicly ban the niqab, the veil obscuring everything but the eyes of Muslim women, Cotler said he discussed this issue with his Quebec Liberal caucus and warned against “stamped[ing] into a decision where we don’t take all [legal] considerations into account.”
Individuals should not be able to “shield behind religion” when issues of public safety or those related to elections are concerned, but, “at the same time, when [it’s] a matter of a woman observing her own beliefs, reasonable accommodation can be made.”
It could “go down a slippery slope,” Cotler said, if the Canadian and Quebec charters of human rights and freedoms are not respected.
Charter limitations, he said, can be enacted only if “they are reasonable and can be demonstrably justified.”