British Columbia Civil Liberties Association | 9 December 1997 | For Immediate Release Civil rights group calls for public inquiry into RCMP actions against APEC protesters on UBC campus The B.C. Civil LIberties Association calls on the RCMP Public Complaints Commission to undertake a public inquiry into the actions of the RCMP in preventing lawful student protests on the UBC campus during APEC, the policies that guided those actions and the source of those policies. The RCMP Public Complaints Commission is the civilian oversight agency for the RCMP, and has the power to conduct public inquiries where it is in the public interest to do so. In a letter sent to the Commission yesterday, BCCLA president Kay Stockholder said: "The conduct of the RCMP at UBC during APEC raises issues about the protection of civil liberties in Canada as serious as those raised by the federal government’s use of the War Measures Act in the early 1970s." Among the RCMP actions which the BCCLA calls upon the Commission to inquire are: the arrest of Craig Jones for refusing to take down a sign the threat to arrest others unless they agreed to take down signs or flags removal of protest signs outside the security fence the conditions which those arrested had to sign in order to be released and the creation of security zones around APEC sites and motorcade routes so broad as to prevent signs and sounds from being visible or audible to APEC delegates. Stockholder noted widely reported allegations that the source or approval of the policies under which the RCMP was acting came from the Prime Minister’s office. If these allegation are true, then the RCMP has allowed itself to be used for purely political purposes. As Stockholder noted: "The use, or threat of the use, of the RCMP’s power of arrest and detention to satisfy a political agenda, or for purposes other than enforcing the law or protecting citizens’ rights, is simply intolerable in a free and democratic society. It is ironic that this appears to be exactly the sort of government behaviour that the students decried in APEC member countries which violate human rights." The BCCLA argues that the Commission should not wait passively for the completion of the RCMP’s own investigation into the complaints, nor should it be left to individuals to bear the cost of launching civil suits in order to get a fair and thorough hearing of their complaints. Stockholder notes that an internal RCMP memo leaked to the press late last week attempts to justify police actions even before an investigation in to the matter has been conducted. "This memo shows that the RCMP is not interested in a serious and impartial investigation of the allegations," she said. "Therefore the Public Complaints Commission must be proactive in getting to the bottom of these apparent violations of UBC students’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly. What policies where the RCMP acting under? And where did their marching orders come from? These are questions to which all Canadians deserve an answer." - 30 -