Raoul Boulakia, a lawyer acting for exiled Canadian Suaad Hagi Mohamud, will be appearing in Federal Court this morning to force the Harper government to issue her an emergency passport. He is also seeking a declaration that the government has "acted in bad faith by arbitrarily denying the applicant's citizenship, and by delaying resolution of confirming her citizenship."Mohamud has been trapped in a Nairobi hotel room for weeks, thanks to Canadian consular officials who have claimed, against all evidence, that she is an impostor.
There is considerable urgency in this matter, as Mohamud is due in a Kenyan court on Friday, which could order her deportation to Somalia, her country of birth.
The increasingly desperate Mohamud provided Canadian officials with her fingerprints eleven days ago. She had previously been fingerprinted as part of her application for Canadian citizenship. But a spokesperson for the Canadian Border Services Agency, Patrizia Giolti, claims that the original fingerprints no longer exist.
"Fingerprints are...destroyed once a citizenship application is closed," Giolti said. "Also fingerprints are not kept as a biometric or as a biodata, they are simply collected to run against criminal databases. So we would not be able to use fingerprints collected during a citizenship application to confirm identity."
How convenient. So why not do a DNA test, then, to see if there's a match with her 12-year-old son, who must be worried sick at this point?
Seems logical, but when brown-skinned Canadians are involved, our government doesn't seem much interested in logic. Remember Abdihakim Mohamed, marooned in Kenya for three years? He's offered his DNA, to match with his Ottawa-based mother's, but not a move has been made to date by Canadian officials.
It seems by the look of it that Minister Lawrence Cannon and his Foreign Affairs
