Things are definitely heating up around the controversial $15 billion Saudi arms deal that the Canadian government of Stephen Harper arranged in 2014 on behalf of General Dynamics and which the new Justin Trudeau Liberal government refuses to cancel.
In recent days, University of Montreal law professor Daniel Turp (an expert in international and constitutional law) and 17 students have filed a class action lawsuit against Ottawa in Quebec Superior Court, seeking to block shipments of the combat vehicles – a move that could force the governing Liberals to explain how they justify the sale. [1] The group also intends to file a similar legal action in Federal Court within the next three weeks. [2]
As I wrote in CounterPunch last October, in 2014 the Harper government announced that the Canadian Commercial Corporation (a Crown corporation) “had secured the largest weapons manufacturing contract in Canadian history: supplying armoured military vehicles to Saudi Arabia. The contract was secured for General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada, a subsidiary of the U.S. giant, which has weapons manufacturing plants in Ontario and Alberta employing a total of about 3,000 workers…It is now widely known that Saudi Arabia has long been funding terrorist activities in the Middle East.” [3]
Professor Turp and the student group have launched an initiative called Operation Armoured Rights, by which they “intend to contest, by all legal means at our disposal, the legality of exporting such military equipment.”
Their (January 2016) Open Letter states: “If the Canadian government refuses to show consistency between the ideals of human rights and its decisions on military exports, it is nevertheless required to comply with the law…Guidelines adopted by the cabinet in 1986 stated that ‘Canada closely controls the export of military goods and technology to countries […] whose governments have a persistent record of serious violations of the human rights of their citizens, unless it can be demonstrated that there is no reasonable risk that the goods might be used against the civilian population.’
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
