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Canada denies visa to Lt Gen (Retd) A S Bahia , again cites war crimes act.

India should stop issuing visas to any canadian police officers for protecting ...
& Why would Canadian Police Officers be interested in visiting india!!!... to get sun-browned...
 
werent the suspects in Kanishka case arrested?

some were released due to lack of evidence (court-ruling)

They bungled up the case really really bad! Many Canadian commentators ended up criticizing the govt's reluctance to hurt the sentiments of the terrorists!
 
India should stop issuing visas to any canadian police officers for protecting killers of hundreds in the Kanishka bombing case and to all govt related people for their abysmal failures on the aboroginal rights issues!

As to the leverage India has on Canada, not much, but Canada als doesn't have any leverage with us, the question is about not leverage or any real damage, its about trading insults, and there we can always find a way :)

You do that, and Canada will stop accepting immigrants from India. :cheesy:
 
was a verdict appeal filed for those acquitted?

Not sure, but only one person was given 5 years in the whole plot!

The police deleted hundreds of tapes containing evidence! The indian police ended up 'getting rid' of some people involved in their own style, for which the canadian heart seems to be bleeding now!
 
Siddharth Varadarajan


Even if legal concepts like universal jurisdiction remain controversial, the globalisation of economic and family life means individuals who violate human rights can no longer count on being shielded forever by the walls of national sovereignty. Your government may not prosecute you for the crimes you have committed but if your offences are serious enough, the chances are that some court in some other country might. As Israeli officers and politicians are today discovering, and as the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet realised in 2000, international journeys are an indulgence to be undertaken with extreme caution if your curriculum vitae includes the commission of war crimes, genocide or crimes against humanity.

Opinions differ but I am convinced this is a good thing. Every country that values the rule of law must ensure that no individual, regardless of official affiliation, enjoys impunity. There are some crimes, like genocide or war crimes or torture, which are an affront to human civilisation regardless of where they have been committed. While foreign courts may or not entertain suits against visiting individuals responsible for such crimes, countries are under no obligation to let them enter their territory. Often, the well-publicised denial of a visa to a leader or official or soldier can have a salutary impact on the struggle for justice in their home country. Subjecting a known violator of human rights to an international boycott is the next best thing to actually prosecuting him.
In 2002, Canada passed the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to take account of its Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act introduced two years earlier. Section 35(1)(a) of the Immigration act says that persons who might have committed an act of commission or omission outside Canada that falls under the definition of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity are ineligible for entry into the country.


As a measure of the seriousness with which this provision is regarded, the Department of Citizenship and Immigration/Canadian Border Services Agency has a Modern War Crimes Section with a Resource Centre staffed by 70 to screen visa applicants. According to a 2004 paper by Joseph Rikhof, Senior Counsel in the Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Section of the Canadian Department of Justice, the Resource Centre is “designed primarily to provide research support to regional field officers, immigration analysts and other enforcement partners in identifying visa applicants and individuals in Canada who may have been involved in war crimes. The Resource Centre also serves as a central repository of current information such as news reports or bulletins gathered from media sources and international human rights organisations”. By 2004, a total of 2,366 “persons complicit in war crimes or crimes against humanity had been refused visas to come to Canada”.

Though the statistics are impressive, one wonders how effective this research process actually is, at least as far as potential migrants from India with a murky past are concerned. For as several visa denial cases which have recently come to light in India demonstrate, Canadian officials appear to have adopted an ill informed, broad-brush approach by which anyone associated with the Indian army, Border Security Force, Intelligence Bureau and other security-related agencies is regarded as a criminal and, thus, ineligible for entry.

When an organisation or agency or state whose involvement in the serious and systematic violation of human rights is so well documented as to brook no second opinion – think the Nazis, the Interahamwe of Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia — denying entry to anyone connected with the regime may well be a good policy. But is it valid to treat the institutions of the Indian state in this manner?

It is true that individual soldiers, constables and officers have committed serious human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir and virtually every part of the country. It is also true that the Indian criminal justice system often fails to take effective punitive action against these individuals. But the question that needs to be asked is whether these violations – and the failure to prosecute — are so systematic, large-scale and widespread as to cross the threshold and implicate the entire state machinery and system in a vast criminal enterprise.

The Canadian visa officials seem to be operating on the assumption that Indian state institutions are indeed beyond the pale. None of the ex-army men whose cases have come to light were denied visas because of their individual involvement in specific human rights violations. But the fact that they served in Jammu and Kashmir with the army or BSF appears to have become the sole reason for being considered guilty of crimes against humanity.
The irony is that Major Avtar Singh, formerly of the 35th Rashtriya Rifles, an ex-officer accused by a Budgam court of murdering the Kashmiri human rights lawyer Jalil Andrabi in 1996, is by some accounts, happily settled in Canada, having migrated there a few years ago. If the Canadian government were to refuse entry to such individuals or even expel them, it would not only be true to the letter and spirit of its immigration law but would also give a boost to those in India who are trying to push the system to take human rights more seriously. Instead of catching this sort of fish, however, it has cast a huge net. The current visa rejections reflect the futility of this approach.

One of the ‘rejection' letters written by the Canadian High Commission to a former BSF constable refers to ‘open source' material on human rights violations committed in Kashmir. One could easily add that there is open source material on the complicity of the Canadian armed forces in the torture of Afghan civilians.
While Canada will have to reverse its over-the-top approach or face the consequences of a diplomatic chill with India, there is also a lesson in this for the Indian government. It needs to take human rights violations more seriously. The BSF men who killed innocent civilians in Bijbehara in October 1993, for example, were never punished despite overwhelming evidence that their firing was unprovoked. The Home Ministry refused to share the proceedings of the General Security Force Court which acquitted them with the National Human Rights Commission. The NHRC said it was “deeply disturbed” by this refusal and even moved the Supreme Court before quietly withdrawing from the matter. Our national outrage at the Canadian characterisation of the BSF would have carried more weight if the Bijbehara episode had a happy ending. The 14 men involved never made it on to any visa blacklist. But they managed to blacken the name of their force.
In much the same way. Canadian peacekeepers involved in the 1993 murder of a Somali teenager, Shidane Arone, may have gotten away with relatively light punishment but they disgraced their country's army in the eyes of the world. Like the BSF, the Canadian armed forces' actions in Somalia or Afghanistan do not make it a “notoriously violent” institution, the phrase used by Ottawa's visa officials to describe the Indian security forces. But they do mean Canada is living in a glass house and cannot afford to throw stones.
Most governments tend to be reluctant to act promptly and sternly against human rights violators in uniform for fear of affecting the “morale” of the security forces. What they don't realise is that a few rotten apples will end up ruining the reputation of the barrel unless they are swiftly dealt with. Long after the current visa crisis blows over, this is a lesson India can ill afford to ignore.

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Ahh, but the land was not owned by anyone (i.e uninhabited) and under the UNSC resolutions (in case of a plebscite) the land would have been either Pakistan's (in which case the current Sino-Pak arrangement is retained) or India's (in which case the transfer specifically states that the Chinese must resolve the issue of ownership with the Indians).

It does not matter whether the land was inhabited or not. It is disputed as per UNSC resolution(which as you keep reminding everyone) and Pakistan had no right to sell it. Yet it did- to buy peace and friendship against a common enemy(India).

Why would Chinese resolve the issue with India. Pakistan sold land it did not own(like you say India does not own J&K or rather J&K is not India).
Your attempts to bank on technical arguments does not cloud the objective assessment of Pakistan's behaviour-opportunistic and illegal-losing the moral right to lecture anyone on "bending the rules when you can".
 
The extremist view indians are showing here and supporting killing innocent people, Canada is doing the right thing. Infact Canada should stop visa to all indians. Perhaps put ban on trade that has relation to indian army, BSF and any other indian defense forces.
 
The extremist view indians are showing here and supporting killing innocent people, Canada is doing the right thing. Infact Canada should stop visa to all indians. Perhaps put ban on trade that has relation to indian army, BSF and any other indian defense forces.

Canada needs India more than we need them.. see this beautiful video and if possible remain calm after that


Click Here for the Link
 
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Canada needs India more than we need them.. see this beautiful video and if possible remain calm after that

International Trade:
Fast Facts on Canada-India Commercial Relations

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Economic Data, 2007

India Canada
GDP (C $ trillions) 1.2 1.5
GDP per capita (C $) 1,079 46,637
GDP growth rate 9.0% 2.7%
Inflation rate 6.4% 2.2%
Unemployment rate 7.2% 6.0%

With fraction of indian population and GDP more than india and export to india is only around 2 billion; Canada needs india more???? You ought to have some shame before boasting. Try to feed 600 million indian poor before you lecture someone who is way out of indian league.
 
International Trade:
Fast Facts on Canada-India Commercial Relations

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Economic Data, 2007

India Canada
GDP (C $ trillions) 1.2 1.5
GDP per capita (C $) 1,079 46,637
GDP growth rate 9.0% 2.7%
Inflation rate 6.4% 2.2%
Unemployment rate 7.2% 6.0%

With fraction of indian population and GDP more than india and export to india is only around 2 billion; Canada needs india more???? You ought to have some shame before boasting. Try to feed 600 million indian poor before you lecture someone who is way out of indian league.

You speak as if bangladesh is a superpower.... Please stop This nonsense.... The person who spoke in that video is the President of the International Development Research Centre , he knows what he is saying more than you do.. so Just Stay calm if you cant take it...
 
You speak as if bangladesh is a superpower.... Please stop This nonsense.... The person who spoke in that video is the President of the International Development Research Centre , he knows what he is saying more than you do.. so Just Stay calm if you cant take it...

It does not matter where I am from thats irrelevant and so does who does talk in video to make money. Data shows what indians are boasting and trying to show they can do jack are just baseless hot air. Canada took right action against indian aramed forces brutality.
 
It does not matter where I am from thats irrelevant and so does who does talk in video to make money. Data shows what indians are boasting and trying to show they can do jack are just baseless hot air. Canada took right action against indian aramed forces brutality.

If it does not matter to me where u r from, so do you, U have no rights to Insult my country, and I dont need to believe u, As that old man whose there In the video is a professional Unlike you or I..

And If Canada took the right action let them stick to it... We dont care much, and the Insult, which we can take it....
 
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