U of A Faculty of Law professor appears as expert witness before House of Commons Justice committee

University of Alberta Faculty of Law Professor Joanna Harrington was invited to share her expertise on extradition law with the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights last week.

In late 2022, the Committee announced it would conduct a study of extradition law reform. Relying on trust between countries, extradition is a process of request and surrender that is used to secure a wanted individual’s presence for trial in the requesting state.

The Committee’s study comes largely in response to widespread criticism from lawyers, academics and human rights organizations about the fairness of Canada’s extradition law, particularly following the extradition of Dr Hassan Diab from Canada to France, and then his return back to Canada, after spending three years in prison without a trial due to a weak evidentiary case. Calls have been made since for an overhaul of the extradition system to ensure a more balanced approach, fairness and transparency.

Harrington testified on February 6, alongside Alex Neve, former head of Amnesty International, and Professor Rob Currie from Dalhousie University, the lead author for the Halifax Colloquium’s Proposals on extradition reform, available here.

In her remarks, Harrington focused on three specific areas. She began by making the case for greater transparency and public disclosure.

“Extradition law and practice is not well understood widely, and if we are to improve extradition we need the data held within government,” she said. “I suspect that this data will show that extradition is often not the speedy, efficient process it is pitched as being. We need to understand why, and to do that we need the disclosure of information.”

One of the ways to accomplish this, she recommended, is to include a reporting obligation in the Extradition Act that would require the minister to present an annual report to Parliament on how many extradition requests we receive, what were the difficulties to address, and what were the end results.

She then addressed the need for extradition to expand beyond the Minister of Justice to also involve the Minister of Foreign Affairs. “By its very nature, extradition involves and implicates both international law and international relations,” she said, adding that the foreign affairs ministry is equipped with the expertise to assess a foreign state’s human rights records, the fairness of its trials, and the condition of its prisons.

Harrington concluded her remarks by recommending extradition judges be given a more robust role, in order to “allow an individual’s circumstances, the values of the Canadian legal system, and the human rights record of the requesting country to be considered directly and openly by a court.” At present, the Minister of Justice personally decides if an individual should be surrendered, and submissions to the Minister are confidential.

Harrington, whose research focuses on foreign relations law, public international law, human rights and transnational crime, has long been a proponent of extradition law reform. She uses her research to contribute to the legal literature, but also reaches out beyond academia to try to influence public policy discussions and stimulate law reform.

In 2018, she took part in the Halifax Colloquium on Extradition Law Reform, which brought together experts to formulate a preliminary set of proposals for reform.

The Colloquium was supported by the Canadian Partnership for International Justice, which is funded by a $2.5 million SSHRC Partnership Grant and received a prestigious Impact Award from SSHRC last year. 

The results of this meeting were outlined in a series of recommendations, now known as the Halifax Proposals.

With the topic of extradition law reform officially before the House of Commons committee, Harrington now waits to see whether meaningful changes will be proposed.