Immigration Minister Dept: If he was implying that Canada’s immigration officials in New Delhi were making up policy as they went along and that as minister, he is somehow not accountable for their actions, he is dead wrong. Everything we know about Canada’s bureaucracy suggests that the policy was in all likelihood just that – a decision made consciously by appropriate authorities for reasons they thought justified it. That Mr. Kenney may not have been aware of the policy is, under the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, irrelevant, according to The Globe and Mail. The answer must be no. Police and border security forces routinely employ or threaten torture and detention without judicial review. In the best hypothesis, this is to compensate for the ineffectiveness of a chronically overburdened and often corrupt legal apparatus. Under a second hypothesis, these measures are necessary because a “foreign hand” usually Pakistan is fomenting subversion. Under a third hypothesis, equally credible, these abuses occur in the service of state political administrations for the purposes of financial predation or political hegemony. None of these are controversial claims, but conventional wisdom among fair-minded observers of India and canada’s immigration officers in New Delhi were refusing visas to former members of India’s armed forces, security services and police, on the grounds that these organizations had been involved in human-rights abuses. The Canadian government apologized for casting aspersions on India’s institutions. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said visa officers have too much latitude. The minister said in a statement that Indian defence and security institutions “operate under the framework of democratic processes and the rule of law.” Well … democratic framework, yes; rule of law, not so much. India has been exemplary among postcolonial nations in the systematic respect of its armed forces for the supremacy of democratically elected governments. This is one of the major reasons why India has been a successful state and Pakistan a perpetually failing one. But are India’s forces of order subject to the rule of law? As
reported in the news.
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@t human rights abuses, visa officers
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