Canadian media and law cooperated to deny suspected Muslim citizens due process

Evidence

In the month of June 2006, there were ‘terror sweeps’ of seventeen young Muslim men in Toronto who were allegedly planning to blow up the CN Tower and the headquarters of Canada’s security services. The young men, five of whom are teenagers, were brought to the courtroom in leg irons, surrounded by the heavy presence of police snipers, a spectacle of ‘dangerous’ Muslim men whose meaning few could fail to grasp. Uncharacteristically naming race, Canadian newspapers covering the June terror arrests openly referred to Muslims as ‘brown-skinned’ and were at pains to make the distinction between those who were merely ‘Canadian-born,’ as the seventeen accused are, and those who are truly Canadian by virtue of possessing Canadian values, if not Canadian skin. Few reporters bothered to consider the presumption of innocence. At the same time as four hundred Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers in battle fatigues were engaged in arresting the seventeen young men, the Supreme Court was getting ready to hear challenges to the constitutionality of security certificates, a legal mechanism contained in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that permits the detention without due process of non-citizens suspected of involvement in terrorism and, more significantly, those considered to have the potential to commit terrorist acts. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 26

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete empirical instance of the ‘terrain of harm’ the reader seeks — policing and legal process operating on citizenship categories without any definitional dispute.
• QUESTION: Worth verifying the actual R v. Toronto 18 outcome — did all charges eventually collapse, and does that bear on the claim that sweeps were theater?