Canadian Woman Allowed To Return Thanks To DNA Test

[merithyn]

You're just wrong.  When entering or exiting a country a valid passport isn't some magical document that gives anyone holding it entry.

If you want to enter a country it is up to YOU to prove that you are who you say you are.  A passport is only some evidence of your identity.  There is no reason the Kenyan government should believe someone holding a passport is the person that passport is issued to.

The one exception is a person entering their home country.  There you have a legal right to enter.

Interestingly, I was under the impression that in foreign countries, my nation's consule was my advocate to do help me do this. If I visited Germany and a Germany official said, "Hmm.. this doesn't look like you. Let me contact the U.S. folks to see what they say." My expectation is that once contacted, the U.S. consulate would be my advocate to help me work this situation out.

Since a person is fingerprinted as part of the passport-getting process, it shouldn't take more than a few hours at most to have it all sorted and for me to be on my plane home.

I'm really failing to see how you can back the ministers that allowed this situation to break down to the point that it did, BB. For 12 weeks this woman was left at the mercy of another country's justice system with no advocacy from the Canadian consul. In fact, she was essentially without a nation for the duration of that time because her own country disowned her without just cause, and she was in a foreign nation.

Then, when it came to light that yes, she was who she said she was, who she proved she was numerous times over, who her employer, friends, family, and lawyer all said she was, not even an "Oops, our bad."?

[Neil]

Since a person is fingerprinted as part of the passport-getting process,

Not in Canada it ain't.

[DisturbedPervert]

Since a person is fingerprinted as part of the passport-getting process,

Not in Canada it ain't.

Not in the US either. 

[merithyn]

Not in the US either.

Am I confusing the Passport for the Greencard? We've applied for both recently, and I thought we had to do the fingerprinting for the passport now, as well as the greencard.

Well shit. I'd advocate for that for my own protection from this kind of crap.

[Neil]

Not in the US either.

Am I confusing the Passport for the Greencard? We've applied for both recently, and I thought we had to do the fingerprinting for the passport now, as well as the greencard.

Well shit. I'd advocate for that for my own protection from this kind of crap.

ACLU would shit themselves.  There's a 0% chance of that happening.

[Josephus]

In the end, fingerprinting might be better than giving DNA samples.

[PDH]

Things I learned from this thread:

Valmy is a million times worse than Hitler.
Canadians are racist.
Kenya is not a great place to pretend to be Canadian.
Neil is God.

[Ideologue]

Heh, anyone thinking this is a "racial issue" should try dealing with the Canadian immigration authorities in Ukraine. 

Fact is, some places in the world are more productive of various sorts of scams and system-gaming, and the authorities are *much* more likely to be jaded and unhelpful if you have the misfortune to be from there - has nothing whatsoever to do with "race", necesarily (last I checked Ukranians were "white").

Where did you hear that kind of nonsense, Malthus?

Did Neil already do this joke?  I haven't read the whole thread.

[dps]

The DNA tests Suaad Hagi Mohamud was forced to undergo last week proved not only that she is who she says she is, but also that she is Canadian.

I wasn't aware that Canadian-ness was genetic.

[Scipio]

The DNA tests Suaad Hagi Mohamud was forced to undergo last week proved not only that she is who she says she is, but also that she is Canadian.

I wasn't aware that Canadian-ness was genetic.

MTE.

[Josephus]

Just so you Languish types are up to speed, since I know many of you have not been able to sleep over this.
This Canadian woman is still in Kenya. The Canadian authorities are reluctant to bring her out until Kenya clears all charges against her.
That's right, clears these trumped up nonsense charges against this black tanned woman.

I mean just for this I shall not vote for Harper's Conservatives next election.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/680529

Allan Woods
in Ottawa
John Goddard
in Toronto

OTTAWA–The federal government continued its foot-dragging yesterday, leaving Suaad Hagi Mohamud to languish yet another day in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.

Her lawyer said he wants the Toronto woman on a flight home tomorrow and Canada has asked Kenya to clear the way for that return.

But Ottawa was reluctant to book the return flight until the Kenyan court has cleared Mohamud of charges – charges since proven false and resulting from a botched Canadian investigation.

Two ministers with responsibility for the stranded Canadian – Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon and Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan – continued their silence on the matter yesterday. Calls to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office were not returned.

But outrage over Ottawa's handling of the case continued to bubble over. Premier Dalton McGuinty issued a stern rebuke of the Harper government, saying there was "no excuse" for its inaction.

"Something is fundamentally wrong when we can't count on the Canadian government to stand up for Canadians. I'm not sure I can put it any more directly than that," said McGuinty.

"It doesn't matter where we find ourselves, we are citizens of this wonderful country and we have responsibilities and we have certain legitimate expectations.

"One of those (expectations) is when we find ourselves in distress that our government will stand up for us. That didn't happen in this particular circumstance and there's no excuse for that."

A spokesperson for Cannon maintained the government was "doing everything in its power" to facilitate as quickly as possible the return of Mohamud, 31, a single mother of a 12-year-old boy.

She is to see Kenyan immigration officials tomorrow morning, her lawyer said. In court, the Kenyans are to drop all charges against her.

Foreign Affairs confirmed last night Mohamud had been to the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi to begin the process of applying for an emergency travel document.

Mohamud, a Somali-Canadian, was branded an impostor by staff of the Canadian High Commission in Kenya because she did not resemble her passport photograph. Her lips were different from the four-year-old picture, as were her eyeglasses.

In a telephone interview from Nairobi yesterday, Mohamud gave further details of the event that started her ordeal when she tried to board a KLM flight home on May 21 after a three-week visit to Kenya.

A Kenyan KLM employee stopped her. "He told me he could make me miss my flight," she said of the KLM worker, who suggested Mohamud didn't look like her passport photo.

He seemed to be soliciting a bribe, she said, an experience Somali-born Torontonians say is commonplace for them at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.

When she didn't pay, a Kenyan immigration official arrested her. Canadian consular officials went along, returning Mohamud to the Kenyans, who threw her in jail on charges of entering Kenya illegally on a passport not her own.

On Monday, DNA tests proved Mohamud's identity.

Yesterday at the high commission, officials continued to treat Mohamud with indifference, a friend who drove her there said.

When Mohamud asked if Canada might help her retrieve her luggage, seized when she was unable to pay her room bill while trying to prove her identity, consular officials refused, the friend said.

In Toronto, lawyer Raoul Boulakia said a friend of his has arranged to pay the bill as a donation.

The Kenyans also owe her $2,500 (U.S.) in bail money, posted after she spent eight days in June at Nairobi's Langata Women's Prison.

Mohamud said the high commission advised her yesterday to stay in the country until she collected the money from Kenya, a process that could take weeks. But Boulakia said he told her to get out of the country first and get the high commission to collect it for her later.

The case highlights the often-puzzling approach the Conservative government takes when deciding which citizens imprisoned or stranded in foreign countries are entitled to high-level help.

Trade Minister Stockwell Day, for instance, requested clemency this summer for a 24-year-old Canadian sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia, but the government abandoned a convicted killer from Alberta sitting on death row in Montana.

Last week, Ethiopian diplomats were called on the carpet after the conviction for terrorism of Canadian citizen Bashir Makhtal. But Abousfian Abdelrazik, who was never charged with a crime and was cleared by Sudan and Canada of suspected Al Qaeda links, lived a prisoner's life for six years, the last of which was spent in limbo on the grounds of the Canadian embassy in Khartoum. He needed a judge's order to bring him home.

For the few Canadians who do get Ottawa's ear, dozens of pleas go unanswered, say advocates and lawyers for citizens who get into tight situations abroad.

"What I find most disturbing is that Canadians are possibly being judged in absentia by an Orwellian jury comprised of the Canadian cabinet," said Dan McTeague, the Liberal MP for Pickering-Scarborough East who was tasked with handling cases of citizens in need of help abroad under prime minister Paul Martin.

Ottawa lawyer Yavar Hameed argued Abdelrazik's case against the government. He said the most troubling government decisions inevitably involve security questions.

"There is this kind of interpretation that we can't do something that's going to be perceived as soft on the war on terror or showing that we're not holding up our end of things," said Hameed, suggesting Ottawa has an ever-present fear of being cast as a security threat to the United States.

Toronto lawyer Lorne Waldman knows better than most how fickle the government can be. He represents Makhtal, an ethnic Somali sentenced to life in an Ethiopian prison for terrorism.

Makhtal's case got the backing not only of Cannon but Transport Minister John Baird, who took up the mantle after being approached by the large Somali community living in Baird's Ottawa West-Nepean riding. They are pushing the Ethiopian government to accept that Makhtal's only link to terror is hereditary – his grandfather founded a separatist Somali group in eastern Ethiopia.

But Waldman has also done battle with Ottawa. He took the government to Federal Court after the Tories decided Ronald Allen Smith, the death row inmate in Montana, was no longer deserving of Canada's help or official government appeals on his behalf that the death sentence be commuted, help that Canadians on death row have received for decades.

In 2007, the Conservatives cut all ties with Smith's case – he was convicted in the 1982 killing of two aboriginal men – because he had been tried and convicted in a democratic country, the United States.

It was the launch of a controversial new policy that was first announced on Nov. 1, 2007 and repeated several times with subtle changes and conditions over the next five months. But legislation, or amendments to existing laws or policies, never followed.

This March, the court ruled that no clear policy actually existed and making life or death decisions on the fly breached Smith's right as a Canadian citizen to the full protection of the federal government.

The judge ruled that while the government has every right to make foreign policy, it must give fair warning and a detailed explanation of those decisions.

The trend of picking which Canadians get access to help and which don't has put the government on a collision course with courts.

[saskganesh]

there was another article in the star about how this women now "feels rushed" and there's "no way she will feel ready to leave in a week." 

also a piece about national/ethnic tensions between lighter skinned Somalis and darker Kenyans, suggesting there's stuff going on here which has nothing to do with Canada.

[Neil]

I mean just for this I shall not vote for Harper's Conservatives next election.

  I don't think there was every any danger of that, Mr. NDP.

At any rate, it's funny to think that she got herself into this by refusing to pay a bribe.

[Neil]

You know, I'm actually looking forward to the fall of Western society.  There's going to be some changes made, and the heirs to these lawyers and judges who have been using the ideal of the 'rule of law' to make themselves supreme are going to face a reckoning.

[Iormlund]

You're just wrong.  When entering or exiting a country a valid passport isn't some magical document that gives anyone holding it entry.

If you want to enter a country it is up to YOU to prove that you are who you say you are.  A passport is only some evidence of your identity.  There is no reason the Kenyan government should believe someone holding a passport is the person that passport is issued to.

The one exception is a person entering their home country.  There you have a legal right to enter.

What a load of bullshit. That is precisely why the Kenyans asked the Canadians for a judgment. For whom that passport should have been enough - or at least warranted further investigation. Instead they sent her to a third world prison where she could have contracted Hep C, HIV or any other kind of nasty shit. Someone should lose his or her job over this, career or not.