American Activists Denied Entry Into Canada
Posted October 4, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A couple of peace activists were arrested in the U.S. while protesting the Iraq war, but they never dreamed their actions would prevent them from entering Canada.
“We are certainly no threat to the Canadian people,” said demonstrator Medea Benjamin.
The arrests landed Benjamin and fellow activist Ann Wright’s names in an FBI-run database, the National Crime Information Center, which Canada also relies on to screen visitors. When the two women visited the country in August, they were told they would have to apply for “criminal rehabilitation” and pay $200 if they wanted to visit again. But they never did.
Derek Mellon, a spokesman with the Canada Border Services Agency, said Canada generally refuses entry to anyone who has been convicted of a criminal offense, regardless of the nature of it. Those with convictions, however, may apply to be rehabilitated, which involves filing paperwork and paying a processing fee ranging from $200 to $1,000.
On Wednesday, Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war group Code Pink, and Wright, a retired Army colonel, walked into Canada at Niagara Falls to test whether they really would be denied entry because of their anti-war-related arrests. And they were.
Benjamin said she and Wright, who resigned as a senior diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Mongolia in 2003, planned to protest at the Canadian embassy in Washington on Thursday and to ask the FBI to remove the protest charges from the NCIC database.
The protesters believe the inclusion of activists’ names in the database is a form of political intimidation of people opposed to Bush administration policies.
John Curr III, director of the New York Civil Liberties Union in Buffalo, said that by relying on the database to screen visitors, Canada is participating in the administration’s suppression of free speech.
“The Canadians accepted wholesale once you’re on the list, you don’t get into Canada.”
