Table of Contents

Letter from the Editor

A Look at Capital Punishment
The Need to Protect Canadian Citizens Abroad
China's Persecution of Falun Gong

Get Involved: Stir It Up!

Comment: Remembering Montreal's Massacre

Remember: send all comments, editorials, questions, and submissions to gryc@rogers.com!

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Letter from the Editor

Welcome to the six-month anniversary of Five Minutes to Midnight! It is incredible how fast this publication has grown and where it is going in the short future. I’d like to thank all the subscribers, contributors, and anyone else who has worked to promote and make Five Minutes to Midnight the great and popular publication it is today.

One of the reasons Five Minutes to Midnight came into existence was to give youth a voice regarding human rights and international issues. It was also meant to raise awareness and educate people regarding different issues plaguing the world today. On our six-month anniversary, it is wonderful to say that we are well on our way to achieving our goals and helping youth all over the world.

November 2003 saw Five Minutes to Midnight begin taking action in schools through a number of ways. First and foremost was presenting at a Brebeuf College, a high school in Toronto, and working with a teacher from the Canadian and International Law class there to have students write letters to governments and organizations that deal with human rights, or even writing articles for this publication. It was a very rewarding experience for both the students and Five Minutes to Midnight staff, as both sides learned quite a lot.

The most wonderful experience of all was to see how education can truly lead to increased action and involvement in human rights work! One of the students in the class chose to do a project focusing on child soldiers in Congo. He researched the topic and by the end of the project, learned many new things. I was walking down the hall at school one day and he came up to me saying how shocked he was that child soldiers are actually being used by factions in Congo and that something should be done.

Truly, such use of child soldiers is unfair and against the articles set out in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is something that should be changed as soon as possible, and it is incredibly motivating to know that as soon as students in Canada’s high schools hear about such things, they want to do something about it. Along with this one person’s response, about twenty-nine other students also did something regarding human rights issues close to their hearts.

And this was only in one high school class! Imagine what would happen if more teachers took the initiative to promote human rights education to such a degree in their social sciences classes! Not only would it educate Canadian youth, it would also help bring about change on a provincial, national, and even international level!

This is what Five Minutes to Midnight is hoping to do. We plan on visiting more schools and even model UNs, and will continue to publish our monthly publication with the quality and dedication that has been put into every issue so far.

            Thanks for reading,
                               Wojciech Gryc

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A Look At Capital Punishment by Mark Cavdar 

The United States of America is head and shoulders above the rest of the world in terms of industry. Their economy is a behemoth, single-handedly dictating how every major nation’s economy shall in turn grow or recede. They are a groundbreaking force in the realm of technological research, with new breakthroughs occurring on a near daily basis. Why is it the that a nation so advanced, so highly developed and powerful, employs something as simple-minded and outdated as Capital Punishment?

In major developed nations, citizens pride themselves on the fact that the evolution of society as permitted the creation and growth of virtuous ideals such as human rights and freedoms. The employment of Capital Punishment as a corrective penalty then comes as somewhat of a shock: the United States may champion the evolution of human rights, yet it still practices archaic punishment methods that clearly infringe upon the universally held belief that all individuals should possess the right to life, liberty and freedom. To some, the death penalty still lives in the United States for no other reason than to satisfy the insatiable bloodlust of an execution-happy nation. Others see it as just desserts for criminals who commit excessively violent crimes, hoping that the brutal end that these criminals meet will act as a deterrent for future offenders.

To justify any punishment as an effective deterrent, it must be administered consistently and promptly. These two criteria are hardly ever found in the cases of death row inmates: of all those convicted on account of premeditated criminal homicide in the United States of America, only 1 in every 33 (about 3%) are put to death. This lends a subjective air to the whole proceedings, eerily reminiscent of the earlier, less equitable days of American justice, where a man’s life would hang in the unbalanced hands of a biased “hanging” judge. Also, a considerable time period elapses between the imposition of the death sentence and its material execution. This is due to procedural safeguards required by the courts, which lead to lengthy tenures in court. Everything from jury selection to post-conviction appeals must be accounted for, squandering years of an individual’s life looming in the backrooms of courthouses.

Justifying capital punishment as a deterrent for homicide is an emotional argument that has no statistical or logical foundation.  While statistics showing an overall decrease in the violent crime and homicide rates cannot be discounted, this encouraging trend can be attributed to several other outside factors. Between the years of 1980-1993 when capital punishment was in full effect, the murder rate steadily increased as executions became more and more numerous. Considering that most capital crimes are committed in the spur of the moment when an individual may be under a great deal of emotional stress, a person’s rationality and reason can be compromised. More murders were committed even in spite of a surging execution rate, clearly proving that a criminal’s mind is unfazed by the prospect of being put to death for their actions. In summation, threatening capital punishment leaves the underlying causes of crime unaddressed and ultimately solves no problems.

Capital punishment from a Christian standpoint is an ironic subject matter for discussion: Religious fundamentalists and zealots stand on one side of the fence touting scripture in hand, thoroughly convinced that the Bible justifies the employment of the death penalty. In the Old Testament, Genesis 9:6 states that “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed;” The Bible, just like every other religious scripture or text, is rife for misinterpretation. This passage gives bible-thumpers the ability to justify their radical views by channeling the barbarous and outdated “eye for an eye, and tooth for a tooth” mentality. They care little for the life hanging in the balance, striving rather to avenge the life that was taken.

On the other end of the debate, open-minded and more liberal Christians believe that the existence of something as audacious as the death penalty is a contradiction to the religion itself, the reverse of what Christianity is in its essence intended to represent. Was Jesus not a flesh and blood manifestation of God’s love? Did he not preach the virtue of loving thy enemy? Was it not his mindset to turn the other cheek when wronged, remembering the loving virtue of forgiveness? Was there ever a speck of fiery retribution in his words? These are probing questions that Christian fundamentalists casually overlook. The essence of the religion is that of forgiveness and unconditional love; misinterpretation is an ignorant foresight that fundamentalists of every creed too often make.

The infringement of human rights presented by the enforcement of capital punishment is only amplified by its final and irreversible nature. Other corrective punishments are revocable and can be reversed if new evidence comes to light; the death penalty, however, is an absolute and undeniable end. On average in the United States, four innocents are convicted of murder every year, scores of whom were sentenced to death. The Marquis de Lafayette, after bearing witness to the excessive redundance of the French Revolution, was once quoted as saying "I shall ask for the abolition of the punishment of death until I have the infallibility of human judgment demonstrated to me." The subjective nature of the justice system can oftentimes impede the accused’s rights, leading to their wrongful death at the hands of the state in the worst-case scenario.

Jesse Tafero, executed in Florida in 1990, is a perfect example of this crucial and devastating flaw in the death penalty. Tafero was convicted of murdering a state trooper, incriminated on the grounds of a shoddy witness testimony. Two years after his death, new evidence came to light regarding the veracity of the testimonial: the witness had lied in court, committing perjury, doing so to avoid a death sentence himself. Jesse Tafero is long dead, but the question still remains to this day: for what reason did he have to die?

Those who are pro-capital punishment will argue that the system, like everything else in life, is imperfect and that a few innocents must die to preserve the system as a whole. To those individuals, lives like Jesse Tafero are simple expenditures, kinks that the system makes as it chugs along. The right to life, liberty and freedom is of no consequence. The United States of America has to come to the realization that there is no fair, equitable way to administer the death penalty and should follow the lead of its major industrial allied nations in taking steps to promptly repeal it; not only for the sake of international affairs, but to protect the integrity of each individual’s human rights and freedoms.

Get Involved

How can you, as a reader and opinionated individual, make a difference? Write a letter to congress, to your local governing body or to a state that still enforces the death penalty. The states that still enforce the death penalty are:

Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington and Wyoming.

For more information, or pre-existing letter writing campaigns to abolish the employment of capital punishment in the United States, get in touch with the American Civil Liberties Union by contacting them using the following information

ACLU CAPITAL PUNISHMENT PROJECT
American Civil Liberties Union
122 Maryland Avenue, N.E.
Washington, D.C. 20002

Telephone: (202) 675-2319
Fax: (202) 546-0738

Be heard!

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The Need to Protect Canadian Citizens Abroad by Joshua Concessao

Canadians pride themselves on their track record when it comes to the promotion of human rights in the world. The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade implements numerous programs each year in the pursuit of social justice. Canada has a fairly high standing in the eyes of Amnesty International, and the Federal Government provides considerable amounts of money to various humanitarian causes around the world. However, all this has been put to the test in the past year or two, and sadly, Canada has not fared too well. Where this country has been found lacking is in its ability to safeguard the human rights of its own citizens in countries around the world; so say the individuals who have been unfortunate enough to learn this lesson first hand. The question that needs to be asked is whether Canada does not do enough to protect its citizens, or whether it cannot do enough to protect its citizens.

One such example is William Sampson: little did he know on November 17, 2001, that he would spend the next two and a half years in a Saudi prison under solitary confinement; and that he would be tortured into confessing to a crime he did not commit. Throughout that time, Sampson’s plight was ignored by the Canadian Government to the point where foreign affairs officials did not believe allegations of torture right up until his eventual release. Sampson was quoted as saying, “It would appear that Foreign Affairs operated as if I was guilty long before I even had a trial.” According to Foreign Affairs minister Bill Graham, any form of a heated response on the part of the Canadian Government would have exacerbated Sampson’s situation and put him in even more danger. This was an interesting take on the situation considering that Sampson was already sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia. Sampson responded by saying, “bringing out things hard would not have exacerbated my situation in the least,” and he felt that the Canadian Government should have taken a stronger stand to begin with. In the end it was left up to British officials to secure the release of Mr. Sampson and those who had been imprisoned along with him.

More recently, the newspapers began to report on the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen and a native of Syria. First viewed by the media and politicians as a terrorist deserving of his situation; public opinion quickly changed once the details of his case became public. Late in September 2002, Mr. Arar, while en route to Montreal, was detained at JFK Airport in New York. At the airport, Mr. Arar was questioned by the NYPD, FBI, and the INS at length about the most personal details of his life. Throughout this ordeal, Mr. Arar’s requests for a lawyer were either ignored or out rightly refused. Following this interrogation, Mr. Arar was put on a plane bound for Jordan and then driven to Syria, where he spent the next year in various Syrian prisons. His time in Syria was marked by frequent torture and being forced to sign confessions stating that he belonged to Al Qaeda. To add to the injustice of this case, it seems the RCMP, a Canadian agency, had a direct hand in singling out Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, to the US authorities. Attempts to hold a public inquiry into this matter have been prevented by the government, stating that this case will be handled by the public complaints commission of the RCMP.

The two cases are two among many and highlight a disturbing trend within this country’s Foreign Affairs Department and the government’s law enforcement arm at large. The government, it seems, is unwilling to protect its citizens and their rights even to the point where they are willing participants in what would normally be characterized as a blatant disregard for the cornerstone laws and values of this country. Instead of following proper procedure, instead of ensuring due diligence, instead of affording these men the rights and freedoms they are entitled to as Canadian citizens, our government branded them as criminals right from the start, a practical application of the “guilty until proven innocent” concept.

This shameless act of ineptitude and wanton authoritarian abuse of trust and power was even defended in the case of Mr. Sampson, where authorities had the gall to compare him to members of the Hell’s Angels biker gang. They refused to believe that Saudi officials had tortured him, choosing to believe instead that his imprisonment had left him mentally unstable. In spite of Mr. Sampson’s accusations that Foreign Affairs did little to nothing to alleviate his situation, and in light of the proof that exists to validate his claim, government officials remain stubbornly convinced that their actions were right.

If the scope of neglect present in Mr. Sampson’s case was not enough, the particulars of Mr. Arar’s case paint an even more disturbing picture. The allegations that the RCMP had a direct hand in Mr. Arar’s arrest, while not proven to be true, should be a matter of grave concern to everyone. It seems that the government is willing to act in an arbitrary manner against its own citizenry in order to appease U.S. security demands. So far, the government has done very little to preserve the credibility of the RCMP by refusing to hold a public inquiry into the whole debacle. To add to that, with the exception of two MPs, one backbencher and one Bloc Quebecois, not a single member of parliament, neither opposition nor government, initially stood up to support Mr. Arar. This brings up an often asked, but yet to be answered question: How much different are we from the very terrorists we are attempting to fight if we are willing to give up every semblance of what makes us a free and just society?

The problem with Canada’s foreign policy is its pursuit of a soft power ideology without the hard power foundation that it needs to be based on. It is not only immature, but it is also highly irresponsible to expect countries to respect and adhere to our societal values and beliefs without being able to instill in them the fear of the consequences of doing otherwise. The aim here is not to achieve some economic, political, or military gain; the aim is to provide a secure environment for Canadians traveling the world and to ensure that none of us have to endure what Mr. Sampson and Mr. Arar have so bravely endured. Unless we learn from the experiences of these two men, we are at risk of learning this terrible lesson first hand.

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China's Persecution of Falun Gong by Wojciech Gryc

As time progresses, society evolves and inevitable changes begin to take hold on both macroscopic and microscopic levels. These dissimilarities with the past are noticed by some and sometimes come in the form of trends that take decades, if not centuries, to reach a verifiable and noticeable form. One of the most important cultural, emotional, and indeed, spiritual, facts of life is the evolution of religion; taking an eleventh grade World Religions course sheds light on this issue as one explores how today’s religions took shape over millennia. In some cases, however, religions and belief systems sprout in an extremely short amount of time and take the world by storm. Such is the case with Falun Gong.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is not a formal religion but rather a system of beliefs and a way of life. The difference, in this case, lies within the fact that members of other religions may practice Falun Gong whenever they choose and by following its teachings, are simply living their lives with truthfulness, benevolence, and forbearance. Mr. Li Hongzhi made the practice public in 1992 and published his teachings in a book entitled Zhaun Falun. Since its inception, Falun Gong has taken the world by storm. Today, it is practiced by millions of people and is even officially supported by governments around the world.

When defined on a broad level, Falun Gong is simply a set of exercises meant to release stress and ameliorate physical and mental health. It is a technique that helps promote peace and harmony on intra- and inter-personal levels. In an age where stress runs rampant and many scientific studies show that mental unrest and negative emotions lead to physical health problems, taking part in something like Falun Gong almost seems necessary. The peaceful exercises help people experience and live lives in accordance with Falun Gong’s universal principle: “Truthfulness-Benevolence-Forbearance”. The practice’s expeditious growth in popularity is a testament of its powerful exercises.

However, Falun Gong’s drastic success has also been its bane. In the early 1990s, China supported its practitioners by allowing public lectures and media coverage of events associated therewith. By 1996, Zhaun Falun became a national best seller, and soon thereafter, estimates showed that between 70 and 100 million people practiced Falun Gong. The number of practitioners began to exceed the Communist party’s membership and the government began to consider the practice a threat. The government initially met this “threat” with harassment and fines, but the aggression escalated into arbitrary arrests, torture, and other unacceptable forms of violence. As of April 2001, over 50,000 practitioners have been arbitrarily detained and more than 10,000 have been sent to labour camps. Others have been sentenced to jail time, sent to mental institutions, tortured, or even murdered.

Such numbers are disconcerting, to say the least. A case-by-case analysis sheds light on horrific examples of torture and human rights abuses. One of the most severe cases occurred in late 2000. Wang Lixuan, a twenty-seven year old practitioner, chose to go to Beijing to show support for Falun Gong. She had done this a number of times and was beaten for her appeals in the past. On her last attempt, however, she was arrested and sent to Beijing Tuanhe Labor Re-Education Camp, along with her eight-month old baby boy. A short time later, her family received a death notification. A coroner’s report revealed that Wang Lixuan had a sunken skull, broken neck, and broken knuckles. Even more shocking were the telltale signs of torture that appeared on her baby’s body: two deep bruises on his ankles, spots on his head, and blood in his nose; all signs implying that he was tortured by being hung upside down by the ankles.

Malicious punishments are not uncommon and encompass a wide range of tactics used by police, staff of labour camps, mental institutions, and the infamous “610 Office,” which is a governmental institution responsible for such tasks as spreading anti-Falun Gong literature and dealing with those who refuse to denounce the practice. Some forms of torture include solitary confinement, immersing practitioners in small jail cells filled with dirty water, and shackling a person’s limbs together, thus preventing that person from sleeping, walking, or even eating.

These are all clear violations of human rights and must be stopped. When dealing with this issue, it is important to note that China is persecuting and in some cases, using an inordinate amount of force to stop people from taking part in Falun Gong. According to Article 20(1) of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.” Therefore, members of Falun Gong are entitled to practice the movement, as its central ideology is based on benevolence and peace.

It is important to support Falun Gong and its practitioners’ need to be protected from human rights violations. There are, in fact, things one can do on a local and global level. Participating in letter writing campaigns, voicing your opinions to Chinese embassies or actually contacting some of the Chinese institutions punishing practitioners is very important. Resources for such initiatives may be found at ClearWisdom.net, an English Falun Dafa website that reports on Falun Gong news, and explains how one can get involved in the movement’s need to be respected in China.

Human rights advocacy in countries violating their citizens’ fundamental human rights is a brave task to undertake, and also a very noble one. Falun Gong teaches benevolence and instructs people how to be at peace with their mental and physical selves. It is a spiritual movement, and one that is supported by millions of people. It is important that the Chinese government accepts Falun Gong and stop persecuting its practitioners.

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Get Involved: Stir It Up! by Allison Martell

Leaving the relative warmth of Toronto’s subway on the afternoon of March 20, 2003, I couldn’t help but feel nervous. I had raced downtown, hoping to join a symbolic student die-in at the intersection of Yonge and Bloor. Though the action had been in the works for weeks, its exact date had been set less than twenty-four hours previously, when the first bombs fell on Iraq. From my first vantage point, I couldn’t see anyone at all. Oh no, I thought, we won’t have enough people to take the intersection.

Then I rounded the corner, and a wave of sound hit me.  Standing, sitting, and lying in the intersection in front of me were more than 1500 high school and university students. Jogging towards the crowd, I found someone who could tell me what had happened. So many people had come, they told me, that they had run out of room on the sidewalk and had taken the intersection early.

Many of the high school students at the die-in were attending their first political protest. To them, its organization must have seemed somewhat mysterious. So where did the die-in begin?

The answer lies sometime in the fall of 2001. That’s when a small group of high school students met at Future Bakery to discuss moving activism outside of their schools and organizing collectively.

Out of those first meetings came a few actions. The first, a mock funeral for victims of the war in Afghanistan, set a tone of creative resistance and street theatre that endures today.

Over the next year and a half, Stir It Up kept meeting and networking between schools. As it began to seem that a war on Iraq was inevitable, more and more students started showing up at meetings. I joined in February, after meeting a Stir It Up member at the Pan-Canadian Student Anti-war Conference. As weekly meetings swelled to an almost unmanageable size, plans for the die-in began to take shape. Stir It Up teamed up with Students Against Sanctions and War on Iraq (SASWI), determined that there would be no “business as usual” while bombs fell on Iraq. We made complicated plans and trained marshals; we brought pamphlets back to our high schools and put up posters around the city; we figured that we needed about two hundred students to pull off the action safely, but as it turned out, none of our complicated plans were needed.

On the day of the die-in, I was pamphleting: handing out flyers and chatting with confused bystanders. Responses were almost universally positive, despite the cold rain that made our paper almost unreadable.

Once we had occupied the intersection for about half an hour, we started to move. We marched down Yonge Street to Dundas, across to University Avenue, and then south to the U.S. consulate. I’ve heard that some people cried when they saw hundreds of youth rounding the corner at University Avenue to join the main rally.

After the die-in, Stir It Up kept organizing. Along with the Toronto Environmental Alliance’s (now defunct) youth caucus and the Youth Action Network, we organized the first Hungry for Change Youth Activism Conference. The two-day free conference included twenty-eight workshops on everything from Hip-Hop Culture and Resistance, to Running for Office, to Sexual Diversity, to Free Trade and Globalization.

This fall, we were very busy with the provincial election; we threw a goodbye party for Ernie Eves and sent a welcome card to Dalton McGuinty, reminding him of all that he promised to do. (He’s forgotten some of the promises already – but it was worth a try.) Now we’re working with a number of other groups to plan Hungry for Change II. This year the conference will be longer and open to university as well as high school students.

Stir It Up is open to all high school-aged youth. We have a very loose structure: tasks are done and plans are made by whoever shows up to meetings. New faces appear almost every week and are always appreciated! We have members at dozens of high schools across the GTA, so when other groups want to promote events to students, they often come to us.

Many political views are represented at Stir It Up – the things that tie us all together are our age and our passion for youth activism. We have inspired similar groups in places as nearby as Pickering and as far away as Baltimore and California.

Stir It Up meets every Monday at 4:30 at the Youth Action Network (176 John Street, suite 307 – that’s just north of Much Music). For more information, email stir_it_up@post.com.

The Hungry for Change II organizing collective is open to anyone under 25, not just high school students. It meets every Thursday at 5:30, also at the Youth Action Network. For more information, email summit@hungry4change.ca.

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Comment: Remembering Montreal's Massacre by Kaley Kennedy

In the years following the September 11th attacks, new light has been shed on the conditions of those living in Middle Eastern countries, and with the War on Iraq still being waged, this issue continues to be a pressing one. One of the major points being addressed by governments and NGOs is the treatment of women, especially equality of women in education and in the workforce. While most people seem to think this is a somewhat understandable issue in countries with strict Muslim leaders, they often fail to realize that violence and discrimination against women is a problem faced even by well-developed and democratic countries such as Canada.

Thousands of Ontario high school students are currently applying to university, a large portion of them being females. Most of these female students will not share the fear of the women in areas of the world where being an educated woman is looked down upon, although sadly, even their privilege as Canadians cannot shield them from the dangers of being a woman looking to be educated: on December 6th, 1989, just about 14 years ago, a man walked into L'Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and shot 14 female engineering students to death, wounded 9 additional women and 4 men before turned the gun on himself. He killed them because they were women; because they were feminists; because they chose to be seen as equals.

Many would dismiss this killer as a madman, an insane and irrational killer, and although this is how is appears, further investigation shows that these labels are not as easy to place. The killer, Marc Lepine, knew exactly what he was doing. He went into classrooms, separating the men and women and systematically killing the women, and repeating several times, “You don’t deserve to be here.” Lepine had plans to kill additional women, yet was unable to do so due to “lack of time.”  Prior to his suicide mission, Lepine wrote a suicide note outlining his reasons for committing this horrible act. It is now known that he was rejected by L’Ecole Polytechnique and blamed feminists, believing that women were accepted because they were favoured by the administration who were trying to appease the feminist movement and not because the women actually deserved it.

In response to this tragedy, the Canadian government invested money into research about violence against women and declared December 6th as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women.  These are great initiatives set forth by the government, though it is important to remember that every day should be a day to remember and act against violence against women. Statistics show that more than half of women will be sexually abused in their lifetime, even more will be the victim of violent attacks. Every seventeen minutes, a woman in Canada is raped; while I wrote this article, about 4 women were fell victim to this crime. Moreover, one in ten women are victims of domestic abuse. All of these statistics show that women deal with abuse on a daily basis and therefore, we should be fighting it every day.

I urge you to check what is going on in your community for December 6th, but also, remember those 14 women killed 14 years ago and realize that violence against women is a problem here in Canada as well as in most of the world. Also focus on the fact that it is not acceptable, ever.  Remember that unless we stand up and take action on a regular basis, you – or someone close to you – may fall victim to such heinous abuse.

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Sources for "A Look At Capital Punishment"

American Civil Liberties Union. 1 December 2003 <http://www.aclu.org/>

Bedau, Hugo Adam. "The Case Against the Death Penalty." ACLU Archives 1997. 1 December 2003. <http://archive.aclu.org/library/case_against_death.html>

"Capital Punishment Statistics." Bureau of Justice Statistics. 1 December 2003. <http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/cp.htm>

Death Penalty Information Center. 1 December 2003. <http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/getcat.php?cid=4>

"Universal Declaration of Human Rights." United Nations. 1 December 2003. <http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html>

Sources for "The Need to Protect Canadian Citizens Abroad"

Amnesty Canada. "At Home and Abroad: Amnesty International's human rights agenda." 6 November 2003. <http://www.amnesty.ca/library/canada/2003agenda_web.pdf>

Amnesty International. "Maher Arar: Chronology of events."

CBC. "In-Depth: The William Sampson Story." 6 November 2003. <http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/sampson/>

Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. "Canada's International Human Rights Policy." 6 November 2003. <http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/foreign_policy/human-rights/hr1-rights-en.asp>

Free Maher Arar. "Latest News & Media Coverage." 6 November 2003. <http://www.freemaherrar.com>

Toronto Star. "Sampson lambastes Canada over torture cases." 6 November 2003. <http://thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/
Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1068117068855>

Sources for "China's Persecution of Falun Gong"

A Witness to History. Falun Dafa, 2001.

Falun Gong. Toronto: Practitioners of Falun Gong, 2001.

ClearWisdom.net. "Falun Dafa." 12 November 2003. <http://www.clearwisdom.net/>

Falun Dafa. "Falun Dafa." 13 November 2003. <http://www.falundafa.org/eng/index_en.htm>

United Nations. “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” 28 September 2003. <http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html>

Sources for "Remembering Montreal's Massacre"

“Sexual Assault: Dispelling the Myths”  Ontario Women's Directorate. 3 December 2003. <http://www.gov.on.ca/citizenship/owd/english/assaulted/
dispellingthemyth.pdf>

The December 6th Fund of Toronto. 3 December 2003. <http://www.dec6fund.ca/>

“The Gunman’s Letter.”  Montreal Massacre, 3 December 2003. <http://www.howdyneighbor.com/one-in-ten/FEMINISTmassacre.html#letter >