by LITAL KHAIKIN
Violations of new Structured Intervention Unit regulations drive home need for Canada to ratify OPCAT
This is the second article in a three-part series on Canada’s historical reluctance to ratify the United Nations’ Optional Protocol with the Convention against Torture (OPCAT). Despite being one of the early champions of this international law that exists to prevent torture in civilian and military detention centres, Canada has still not officially adopted the agreement. The first article examines the lack of transparency and bureaucratic reticence toward OPCAT. The second part examines the circumstances in Canadian detention centres—and care and medical environments—that urgently call for this greater accountability. The third part examines precedents in Canadian military use of torture alongside Canada’s spotty human rights track record.
The turbulent past year has cast a spotlight on the systemic problems with Canada’s carceral system, from criminal incarceration to migrant detention. This past summer saw protests against police brutality and the inhumane conditions endured by undocumented migrants in Canada, as well as calls to defund bloated police budgets and growing momentum for the prison abolition movements.
Despite this mounting criticism, there has been little discussion of a key international treaty on human rights that Canada has repeatedly failed to ratify. In September, Canadian Dimension published an exposé on the reluctance of Canadian government officials to sign the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT)—an international human rights agreement that Canada helped set up in the first place.
OPCAT provides concrete measures for prevention and oversight that go beyond the gesture of opposing torture through the Convention. By ratifying OPCAT, Canada would be mandated to create a National Preventive Mechanism (NPM) to ensure that places of detention abide by internationally defined standards of humane treatment. Given the scope of the UN’s definition of torture, OPCAT could potentially apply beyond civilian and military prisons to include other places where people are forcefully detained, such as immigration detention centres or mental health facilities.
For Canada to ratify OPCAT, or introduce any oversight over federal institutions, would need to go hand-in-hand with the introduction of national standards, against which Canada’s compliance can be measured. Yet, the foot-dragging of Canadian legislators on the issue of torture prevention has received little coverage in Canadian media. As a result there is a lack of public awareness of the effects that this international law might have across different sectors of society.
Same system, different name
The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), for instance, is notoriously lacking in independent oversight, with hundreds of complaints about discrimination, abuse and harassment by officers filed just in the last two years. As Canada’s Correctional Investigator Ivan Zinger previously told Canadian Dimension regarding Canada’s current oversight agreement with the International Red Cross, “It is very odd for an advanced democracy to use that.”
Outgoing Amnesty International Secretary General Alex Neve expressed remorse that despite the organization having campaigned for decades on torture prevention, Canada had still not lived up to its promise to ratify OPCAT. “This would be quite high on the list in terms of confounding and disappointing files,” he told Canadian Dimension just prior to his official departure, “that over the course of those 20 plus years, we have not been able to get Canada to sign onto something so elementary.”
Canadian Dimension for more