Maher Arar is, by all accounts, a Canadian success story. Born in Syria, he came to this country 15 years ago, finished a master's degree and is considered an expert in the field of communication engineering. He has two young children, and his wife, also a Muslim, has a PhD in mathematics from McGill. Since 1998, he has made business trips to the United States without any border problems.

This summer, the family visited Tunisia. Mr. Arar planned to return this fall to attend to business. His family was supposed to join him later.

On Sept. 26, en route to Montreal from Zurich, Mr. Arar was pulled aside while waiting to change planes at New York's Kennedy International Airport. Unaware of recent U.S. regulations requiring all aliens born in Syria (among other countries) to be profiled, Mr. Arar was fingerprinted and photographed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The INS questioned him for nine hours, without the presence of a lawyer, and accused him of knowing suspected "terrorists" in Canada, which he denied. It threatened to deport him to Syria, where he had missed military service and was thus in danger of imprisonment. As a Canadian citizen, he asked to be returned to Canada.

The INS kept him in an airport jail, then transferred him the next day to Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center, where he was kept in solitary confinement.

On Oct. 1, Mr. Arar was given permission to make a phone call; he contacted relatives in Ottawa and asked them to find a lawyer for him. Until Oct. 1, Mr. Arar's relatives had no idea of his whereabouts. They contacted the Canadian government, which, in turn, queried U.S. authorities, who informed the Canadian consulate in New York of Mr. Arar's imprisonment. To its credit, the consulate filed an official protest with the U.S. government for its failure to immediately inform Canadian officials of the detention of a Canadian citizen, in apparent violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

Canadian officials visited Mr. Arar on Oct. 3, and reported that his emotional state was fragile. The previous day, Mr. Arar had been charged with three counts of immigration violations, and one count of belonging to a terrorist organization. He adamantly denied the latter.

On Oct. 9, the INS moved Mr. Arar to an undisclosed location, without notifying Canadian officials.

The next day, without a trial, access to a lawyer or presentation of evidence, Mr. Arar was deported to Syria due to an immigration violation.

While the most severe penalty for immigration violation under U.S. law is deportation, international human-rights laws stipulate that the deportee must be returned to either his country of citizenship or origin of travel. In this case, Mr. Arar should have been deported to Canada or Zurich.

There have been other disturbing cases of Canadian citizens being held without charge in the post-9/11 U.S. justice system.

Unsir Hafeez and Reza Zazai (originally from Pakistan and Afghanistan, respectively) were arrested Sept. 10 on immigration charges and held for suspected terrorist links, which have not yet been proved. Mr. Zazai's lawyer indicated that this case involves serious constitutional violations of the rights of a Canadian citizen, and while the INS has the right to charge him with an immigration violation, it does not have the right to engage in preventive detention. The U.S. government has yet to produce evidence to link Mr. Zazai to terrorism. Like Mr. Arar, the two were going about their lives until they were detained by the Americans. Unlike Mr. Arar, the two were fortunate to have access to a lawyer.

This summer, Shakir Baloch, a Pakistan-born doctor with Canadian citizenship, was returned to Canada after a enduring a six-month nightmare. Caught in the post-9/11 immigration sweep, he was held in a maximum security prison for four months without charge and barred from contacting his wife in Toronto. The INS refused to honour a deportation order issued the day after his arrest. Mr. Baloch was confined to his cell 23 hours a day; during the other hour, he was allowed to exercise while shackled. As with Mr. Arar, Canadian officials were tipped when family members asked for help, rather than being informed by U.S. authorities. Despite diplomatic protests, Mr. Baloch was held without charge and released only after receiving clearance by the FBI.

Then there is the case of student Mohammed Jabarah, a 20-year-old Canadian citizen who took a brief trip across the border (at the behest of CSIS) to help U.S. officials investigate an alleged terrorist plot. He was promptly jailed without charge.

Most troublesome was how the Canadian government, through CSIS, facilitated the transfer of Mr. Jabarah. First detained in Oman, he returned to Canada accompanied by CSIS officials and was questioned here before being moved to the United States. None of the powers of the government's new antiterrorism legislation, including preventive arrest and compulsory testimony, were used against him. Instead, CSIS abetted an arrangement that left a Canadian citizen in a foreign jail, out of the reach of his family and outside the protection of his own government.

On Aug. 15, Human Rights Watch, a private New York-based human-rights monitor, issued a scathing report charging that U.S. authorities deliberately trampled constitutional rights after Sept. 11 in a crackdown that saw immigrants jailed without cause, tried in secret and, in some cases, physically abused. It accused the Bush administration of displaying "a stunning disregard for the democratic principles of public transparency and accountability" in its response to the terrorist attacks. "The country has witnessed a persistent, deliberate and unwarranted erosion of basic rights against abusive governmental power."

The group's U.S. advocacy director said authorities have used immigration charges to make an "end run" around legal safeguards. By holding suspects on immigration charges, authorities avoided having to give reasons for arresting them, bringing them before a judge within 48 hours and providing court-appointed lawyers.

As constitutional challenges slowly make their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, many innocent lives are being destroyed. Since Washington is not informing consular officials of detained citizens, who knows how many waste away in prison?

In the case of Maher Arar, our government needs to press Syria for his safe return. Parliament needs to begin a substantial debate on the violation of Canadian sovereignty by the deportation of one its citizens by the United States, in a case where the cornerstones of transparency, accountability and presumption of innocence have been discarded.

We need to resist the erosion of basic human rights in light of unilateral U.S. actions.
Sheema Khan is chair of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Canada.