Canada court junks plea to board flights

OTTAWA: A Canadian court has thrown out a bid by two Sikh extremists to get off the country’s no-fly list, saying there are ‘reasonable grounds’ to suspect they will threaten transportation security or travel by air to commit a terrorism offence.

The Federal Court of Appeal in its ruling this week dismissed an appeal by Bhagat Singh Brar and Parvkar Singh Dulai after they lost a constitutional challenge of their no-fly designations under Canada’s Secure Air Travel Act, The Canadian Press news agency reported from Vancouver on Thursday.

The two were not allowed to board planes in Vancouver in 2018. The ruling says the act empowers the public safety minister to ban people from flying if there are “reasonable grounds to suspect they will threaten transportation security or travel by air to commit a terrorism offence.”

“At some point, the appellants tried to fly. They could not,” the ruling says. “They were on the list and the minister had directed that they not fly.” The appellate panel found that based on confidential security information, the minister “had reasonable grounds to suspect that the appellants would travel by air to commit a terrorism offence.”

In 2019, Brar and Dulai went to the Federal Court of Canada to have their names struck from the list. But Justice Simon Noel ruled against them both in 2022.

The limits imposed on Dulai, he ruled, “were the result of evidence-based suspicions he could fly abroad in order to plot a terrorist attack.”

“The Government of Canada must enact laws that protect national security and intelligence activities in a way that respects rights and freedoms and encourages the international community to do the same,” Noel ruled.