Canada Detains Former UN Human Rights Rapporteurs Traveling to Palestine Event

Former UN special rapporteurs Richard Falk and Hilal Elver were detained and interrogated by Canadian authorities on Thursday while on their way to an event examining Canada’s role in the genocide in Gaza and continued abuses against Palestinians.

Falk, who turned 95 on the day he was detained, said that officials deemed he and his wife posed a “national security threat” to the country upon their arrival at an airport in Toronto. Falk was the UN special rapporteur for Palestinian human rights between 2008 and 2014 and Elver was the UN special rapporteur on the right to food from 2014 to 2020.

“A security person came and said, ‘We’ve detained you both because we’re concerned that you pose a national security threat to Canada,’” Falk told Al Jazeera on Sunday, from Ottawa. “It was my first experience of this sort — ever — in my life.”

Border agents took Falk and Elver’s passports, he told CBC, and brought them to an interview room. Falk said that authorities held him and Elver for over four hours, grilling them on their work on Israel and Gaza, and interrogating them about the genocide more generally. Eventually, they were released.

The questioning was “random and disorganized,” Falk said, but still an element of a global campaign to “punish those who endeavour to tell the truth about what is happening” in Gaza.

“It’s disappointing that Canada — after having acknowledged Palestinian statehood — would take such a hostile attitude toward a very forthright conference that really explained to a public, that hasn’t been so well-informed, the nature of the objections to what Israel has been doing,” he said. “It suggests a climate of governmental insecurity, I think, to try to clamp down on dissident voices.”

Advocates for Palestinian rights have sharply criticized Canada’s government for sending Israel military support, even though officials pledged to stop sending weapons that could end up in use in Gaza last year.

Canada’s Border Services Agency told CBC that the detention was “normal” and “should not be viewed as any indication of wrongdoing.”

Both Falk and Elver were slated to participate in the Palestine Tribunal on Canadian Responsibility, described by organizers as a “people’s tribunal on Canada’s complicity in the genocide and dispossession of Palestinians, including over the last two years in Gaza.”

Falk said he suspects they were stopped due to their planned participation in the event. He and his wife are both U.S. citizens, and have taught at prominent American universities.

The chair of the tribunal, Azeezah Kanji, told CBC that Falk’s detention was “outrageous.” Canadian Sen. Yuen Pau Woo, who supports the tribunal, said he was contacted by the conference’s organizers about Falk’s detention. He expressed alarm that Canadian officials may have detained them over their participation in the tribunal.

“We know they were here to attend the Palestine Tribunal. We know they have been outspoken in documenting and publicising the horrors inflicted on Gaza by Israel, and advocating for justice,” Woo told Al Jazeera. “If those are the factums for their detention, then it suggests that the Canadian government considers these acts of seeking justice for Palestine to be national security threats — and I’d like to know why.”