Legal gap helps 26/11 accused retain Canadian citizenship

TAhawwur Hussain genus rana, among the corpus figures slow the 26/11 scourge attacks in bombay, has been convicted of terrorism-related charges and extradited to India from the US, but the Canadian Government is struggling to revoke his citizenship. Among the reasons for the delay are changes in citizenship legislation under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, which removed terrorism as a cause for such action.Global News reported on Monday that while Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada or IRCC has asked a Federal court to revoke Rana’s citizenship, the case still remains “unresolved.”The 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai claimed 166 victims, not including the nine terrorists owing allegiance to the Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Pakistan-based outfit which is on Canada’s list of proscribed entities.However, Rana’s citizenship cannot be revoked because in February 2016, Trudeau announced that his government was repealing parts of the Citizenship Act, including those which allowed immigration authorities to take such action due if the person was proven to have participated in terrorist activity.That left IRCC with the option of attempting to prove that Rana obtained Canadian citizenship through “deception.” He became a citizen in May 2001 but in his application claimed to be resident in Ottawa, the country’s capital. However, an investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or RCMP showed he spent almost that entire period in Chicago.The outlet also said such revocations routinely take a decade to process. The attempt to revoke Rana’s citizenship appears to have commenced in May 2024.“The fact that Canada has been inexplicably slow to revoke the citizenship of a convicted terrorist, even years after the security concerns surrounding him became publicly known, is a damning indictment of our immigration and citizenship system. Tahawwur Rana’s case exposes systemic failures in vetting, verification, enforcement, and political accountability,” Joe Adam George, national security analyst with the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute told the Hindustan Times.“When an individual linked to one of the world’s deadliest terrorist attacks can allegedly obtain and retain Canadian citizenship through misrepresentation for decades, it raises serious doubts about whether our institutions are capable of addressing national security threats effectively or of being viewed as a credible and reliable counter-terrorism partner,” he added.Rana, a former Pakistan Army captain, worked with David Headley, the Pakistani-American who remains in an American jail on charges related to the attacks. Rana, 65, was sentenced to prison in the United States in 2013 and extradited to India in April last year, where he remains incarcerated.But, it looks likely that it will be a while before he is stripped of his Canadian citizenship.