Supreme Court ‘signed my son’s death warrant,’ mother says of refusal to hear plea

OTTAWA — The mother of a Canadian man detained in Syria says the Supreme Court of Canada has signed her son’s death warrant by closing the door on a plea to hear his case.

“I’ve been screaming about this for 7 1/2 years now,” said Sally Lane, the mother of Jack Letts. “I’m exhausted. I just want my son back.”

The Supreme Court had already declined to hear a challenge of a Federal Court of Appeal ruling that said Ottawa is not obligated under the law to repatriate Letts and three other Canadian men.

In a fresh notice filed with the court in March, lawyers for the men said exceedingly rare circumstances warranted another look at the application for leave to appeal.

A letter to the lawyers, dated last Friday, says the motion for reconsideration cannot be accepted for filing, leaving no further remedies in the top court.

“I have reviewed your motion for reconsideration and your affidavit in support,” says the letter from the court registrar. “I regret to inform you that, in my opinion, your motion does not reveal the exceedingly rare circumstances which would warrant reconsideration by this Court.”

The detained Canadian men are among the many foreign nationals in ramshackle detention centres run by Kurdish forces that reclaimed the war-ravaged region from militant group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Letts became a devoted Muslim, went on holiday to Jordan at 18, then studied in Kuwait before winding up in Syria. His family says he was captured by Kurdish forces while fleeing the country with a group of refugees in 2017.

Letts and the three other Canadians won a battle in their protracted fight in January 2023 when Federal Court Justice Henry Brown directed Ottawa to request their repatriation from the squalid conditions as soon as reasonably possible and to supply passports or emergency travel documents.

Brown said the men were also entitled to have a representative of the federal government travel to Syria to help their release take place once the captors agreed to hand them over.

However, the Federal Court of Appeal overturned the ruling.

The Nov. 1 letter from the Supreme Court registrar says the file is now closed and no further documents will be accepted for filing.

“The Supreme Court has just callously signed my son’s death warrant,” Lane said on Monday.

“I expect this government not to care about human rights since all they care about is popularity in the next election, but for the Supreme Court not to care either is gutting and actually unbelievable.”

The identities of the other three Canadian men are not publicly known.

In the original application to the Supreme Court, lawyers for the men said their clients had been arbitrarily detained for several years without charge or trial.

“They are imprisoned in severely overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, with at least one Canadian being held with 30 other men in a cell built for six. They lack adequate food and medical attention and one of the applicants reported to Canadian government officials that he had been tortured.”

The lawyers said the men’s foreign jailers would release them if Canada made the request and facilitated their repatriation, as it had done for some Canadian women and children.

Lawyer Lawrence Greenspon, who represents two of the anonymous men, expressed disappointment Monday at the Supreme Court’s latest pronouncement.

Greenspon said a complaint to the United Nations about the federal government’s inaction is a possibility.

The court’s decision follows the recent death in Turkey of a Canadian woman who had escaped from a detention camp in northeastern Syria.

Sen. Kim Pate, human rights activist Alex Neve and lawyer Hadayt Nazami called on Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly last month to open an impartial investigation into the death.

Pate, Neve and Nazami were part of a delegation that met the woman and her six young children in August 2023 in a Syrian camp.

The federal government helped the children come to Canada in May. However, Ottawa refused to repatriate the woman, publicly known only as F.J., on security grounds.

Asked last Friday about the case, Joly said there’s a need to understand the circumstances of the woman’s death.

“Her six children are in Canada. We owe them the truth and, not only that, we owe them support,” she said. “And so they can personally count on me to make sure that that is a priority of mine and of my team.”

Joly’s department, Global Affairs Canada, provided no details Monday about what that might entail.

Spokesperson Renelle Arsenault said Canada is aware of reports of a Canadian woman’s death in Turkey, adding Canadian officials “are in contact with local authorities on this matter.”

Greenspon, who has assisted the family, said it is important to get to the bottom of what happened. “This is a matter that clearly needs to be investigated.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 4, 2024.

Jim Bronskill, The Canadian Press