| Abstract: | This article examines the security certificate process that has been in effect in Canada since 1978 and the 2008 amendment (Bill C-3) of the Immigration and Refugees Protection Act. It highlights how democratic means can be used to subvert meaningful policy changes, and underscores the antinomy inherent in a nation-state's zeal to protect its citizens and appeals by a group of Arab Muslim men held under security certificates for suspected terrorist activities for their human rights to be recognised and respected by a state in which they are non-citizens. The problematic immanent in nation-states serving as guarantors of human rights and its concomitant misconstruing of human rights for citizenship rights are used to demonstrate that an ‘internal Other’ has been created in Canada. The security certificate, it is argued, in stipulating that detainees may request to be deported to countries where they regularly reside or hold nationality, makes them akin to Hannah Arendt's notion of the ‘rightless’ – people who have not only lost their home (i.e., polity) or ‘distinct place in the world’, but also their legal status. Consequently, even in an advanced democracy with grandiose claims to, and assurances of, individual liberty and fundamental freedoms, ‘rightless’ people face a great danger by the fact of being nothing beyond ‘human’. |
