This Man of Good Character
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"A lawyer should act with integrity -- not simply honesty, but with candour and the strength of good character to take accountability when mistakes are made. They must not only act within the Rules of Professional Conduct but be mindful of the consequences of their actions.""In my teenage years and early 20s, I was highly driven to change the world and right injustices. I was restless, wanted things to happen quickly and I felt invincible.""My time in prison changed me forever; it gave me perspective and forced me to look at myself and evaluate my weaknesses.""I often relive the events post-2004 and know how differently I would approach that situation now. I do not believe the ends justify the means. They do not, and I have paid a heavy price for having made that mistake once."Suresh Sriskandarajah, Tamil-Canadian, Toronto
In 2013 Sriskandarajah pleaded guilty in a New York courtroom to conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. He was sentenced to two years in prison at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. While there he tutored dozens of inmates. He also wrote his first-semester law school exams, as a law student at University of Ottawa, Ontario. He was one of six Canadians an FBI probe charged with giving aid to the Tamil Tigers, viewed as a terrorist organization in the United States.
Three others were arrested in New York, while Sriskandarajah was eventually rendered by Canadian authorities to the U.S. to stand trial, accused of researching and acquiring communications, aviation and night-vision equipment and warship-design software for the Tamil Tigers a group fighting the Sri Lankan government for a Tamil homeland. He appealed the extradition request all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, and it took six years for his extradition to take effect.
Sriskandarajah was born in Sri Lanka in 1980, a minority Tamil, at a time of escalating civil strife when at seven years of age he saw a relative die after swallowing a cyanide capsule, evading government soldiers. Not long after that, his father working on an oil tanker as a deckhand, declared himself a refugee when the ship arrived at the port of Montreal. It took a year before his mother and one brother were able to join his father and Sriskandarjah at age eight was left with extended family, until a year later he and another brother were able to join their parents in Canada.
He was an excellent student, studying engineering at University of Waterloo. He returned to Sri Lanka in 2004 on a student exchange program to help set up a technology training centre in the country's northeast where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) acted as government and where he "was pressured to abandon his humanitarian work in order to teach computer programming to members of the LTTE's technology division".
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"I did not appreciate the broader implications my decision to associate with the Tamil Tigers would have. However, at no point did I support any forms of violence", he wrote in a 'reflection' to a Law Society of Upper Canada Tribunal tasked to decide whether a man once convicted of a terrorist offence should be granted permission to practise law in the province. "If the [law society] were to decide a person of Suresh's character is not eligible, this would be a signal that our legal profession does not accept contrition and redemption as truly operative values", wrote supporter Craig Scott, a law professor and former member of Parliament.
He had returned to Sri Lanka a second time when 2004 was winding down, at a time a powerful earthquake took place sending tidal waves over the coastal areas of countries abutting the Indian Ocean, including Sri Lanka. When it happened, he rushed to an orphanage where he had volunteered and discovered that 150 of 170 children there had been killed in the tsunami. "I felt compelled to assist in any way I could. I became involved in relief efforts, including the burial of dead bodies speaking with foreign media in an attempt to give voice and raise awareness to the destruction I had personally witnessed." And among other things he had witnessed the Tamil Tigers alone giving aid.
Just before he was extradited to stand trial in the U.S., Sriskandarajah married, finished his first semester of law school at University of Ottawa, but was taken to New York before he was scheduled to write his exams. He took those exams while in prison. The New York judge, Raymond Dearie who presided over his trial, said: "Everything about him is positive, but for his involvement in this [Tamil Tiger] activity". Deported back to Canada in 2014 after serving his sentence he transferred to Osgoode Hall at York University to continue his law studies, where he graduated with honours.
A three-lawyer panel earlier this month came to a unanimous decision that Sriskandarajah had passed the 'good character' requirement becoming eligible to be granted a lawyer's license. It is a standard for anyone filing membership application to the Law Society of Ontario to work as a lawyer to answer a series of questions to establish 'good character'. One of the questions is whether the applicant had ever been convicted of a crime.
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Labels: Criminal Conviction, Law Society of Ontario, Tamil Tigers, Tamil-Canadian
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, October 28, 2020
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