RCMP Watch

Kate Jaimet, CanWest News Service; Ottawa Citizen

The RCMP works with Chinese security forces to fight crime and exchange information about criminals, suspects, witnesses and missing people, according to a document obtained by the Ottawa Citizen.

And while the RCMP defends the arrangement, one prominent human rights lawyer says it may lead to the Mounties using information obtained from witnesses and suspects under torture.

The 1999 Memorandum of Understanding _ obtained under the Access to Information law _ expresses Canada’s intent to work with China in combatting a list of international crimes including money laundering, forgery, smuggling, terrorism, illegal immigration, trafficking in weapons, drugs, art treasures, or human beings and “any other area of mutual interest.”

Under the memorandum, the two countries pledge to help each other locate criminals, suspects, witnesses and missing persons, and to exchange information about crimes, whether planned or in progress.

The memorandum, signed on April 16, 1999, expired in 2004. But Staff Sgt. Dan Ouellette of the RCMP’s international policing branch, said that while it has not been renewed, the RCMP continues to co-operate with China on essentially the same terms as outlined in the document. He said Canada works with China on several major criminal cases each year.

“This is problematic,” said Winnipeg human rights lawyer David Matas, who represents Lai Changxing, a man accused of smuggling by the Chinese government. “Evidence obtained in China, what they euphemistically call information, may be information elicited through torture.”

Matas said confessions of witnesses against his client were gathered in China through torture. According to the latest report by Amnesty International, tens of thousands of people are held in Chinese prisons “in violation of their human rights and … at risk of torture or ill-treatment.”

But Ouellette said he has spoken with Canadian investigators working on joint investigations with Chinese police, and he has never received evidence of torture being used.

“At the end of the day, on the cases we’ve worked with, I’m comfortable that’s not the case,” he said.

University of Toronto international relations professor Wesley Wark said information-sharing agreements are necessary for law enforcement.

“In the Chinese case, there’s been a great deal of concern … about criminal activities, drug smuggling, people smuggling,” he said. “The idea is that there is some advantage in trying to combat those things offshore.”

However, Wark said, there should be controls on how information is shared with governments like China’s, which do not meet western human rights standards.

“You could well have information about Canadian citizens passing through foreign agencies in ways that could really endanger reputations, careers, even lives, if those people, in travelling abroad, find themselves the subjects of investigation, surveillance or imprisonment overseas,” he said.

Wark said testimony from the Maher Arar inquiry left the perception that the RCMP’s controls on foreign information-sharing were “a little too loose and a little too fluid.” Arar, a Canadian citizen who had been under surveillance by the RCMP, was detained in the United States in 2002, deported and imprisoned in Syria for a year without trial.

But Ouellette said he has never seen a case of Chinese authorities using information provided by Canada to arrest or imprison someone without due process of the law.

“My experiences in criminal matters in dealing with the Chinese have been positive,” he said.