U of A taken to court for breaching Palestine encampment protestors' Charter rights
The university is accused of violating the freedoms of expression, association and assembly of its faculty and students by ordering police to tear down the People's University for Palestine in 2024.
The University of Alberta violated faculty and students’ Charter rights when it called police to campus in May 2024 to forcibly remove a pro-Palestine encampment, according to a lawsuit filed at the Court of King’s Bench last week.
The Charter challenge is being launched by UAlberta graduate students Noor Abdo and Mustapha Yasssin, who are both Palestinian-Canadian, and English and Film Studies Prof. Michael Litwack, who is Jewish.
Their April 10 application, filed by Edmonton lawyer Avnish Nanda, argues that the university’s decision to call police to dismantle the People’s University for Palestine (PU4P) encampment violated the applicants’ Charter freedoms of expression, assembly and association.
“The Applicants participated in the student[-]led encampment to express genuinely held belief[,] peacefully protest, and collectively demand specific action from the university,” reads the application.
Their demands were for the university to fully disclose its investments in companies complicit in Israeli human rights abuses and divest from them, provide amnesty for all encampment protestors, and condemn Israeli human rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The application references the “hostility” Abdo and Yassin faced as Palestinian-Canadian students on campus, alongside their shared sense of “moral and ethical obligation to advocate against Israel’s actions.”
It also notes Litwack’s sense of “ethical and political obligation to ensure that the lessons of the Holocaust are upheld.”
The application describes the PU4P as a “grassroots and horizontal student-led effort where decisions would be made collectively.”
The encampment was deliberately established at the university’s Main Quad, a large, open space in the middle of campus, so it “could attract the largest number of student protestors and ensure their message reached a wider audience.”
Community members brought blankets, tables, chairs, tents, coolers, art supplies and a first-aid kit.
“A library was established on the encampment by Litwack, and discussions were held on the history of the Palestinian experience, allowing students to educate themselves and others on the topic,” the application reads.
As previously reported in this newsletter, campus security repeatedly reported to the university’s executive team that the encampment was peaceful on May 9, 2024, the day encampments were set up at UAlberta and the University of Calgary.
Calgary police dismantled the UCalgary encampment that evening with a level of force that led to two protestors being diagnosed with concussions.
On May 10, Premier Danielle Smith praised the police action at UCalgary. “I’ll watch and see what the University of Alberta learns from what they observed in Calgary,” Smith told reporters at an unrelated news conference.
Readers of this newsletter will know that on the same day, the premier’s then-chief of staff Marshall Smith echoed his boss’s sentiments to then-Calgary police chief Mark Neufeld, as did Advanced Education Minister Rajan Sawhney.
A few days later, Neufeld logged a phone call with Marshall Smith, in which Smith assured him that the province’s police watchdog “won’t investigate” police conduct at the encampment, but would instead launch a limited probe into whether there was any “serious injury.”
According to Justice Adele Kent’s independent review of the UAlberta encampment, Sawhney and Public Safety Minister Mike Ellis, a former Calgary cop, met with the heads of Alberta’s universities in early May to discuss the possibility of pro-Palestine encampments, given their occurrences on other campuses in Canada and the U.S.
On May 9 and 10, Advanced Education Alberta officials repeatedly discussed the encampment with UAlberta administration.
In her report, Kent noted that UAlberta administration had “complete about-face” in their approach towards the encampment after the tents in Calgary were torn down, leading to the Edmonton encampment’s forced dismantling in the early hours of May 11.
Kent concluded that the university acted appropriately in calling police to dismantle the encampment, citing the “risk of liability” if the situation on campus escalated.
The court application, however, notes that she repeatedly conceded in her report that the encampment was “peaceful.”
“There was nothing threatening about what the protesters were doing,” Kent wrote in her report.
She added that “it is likely that the restrictions imposed by the University on the protest could trigger Charter scrutiny.” And here we are.
Section 1 of the Charter notes that the rights contained in it are “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”
Kent acknowledged in her report that the burden is on UAlberta to determine that the limits they imposed on PU4P participants’ Charter rights were reasonable and justified.
In addition to dismantling the PU4P encampment and dispersing its participants, the UAlberta executive team banned further protest encampments on the same issue from the campus Main Quad, and threatened academic and legal repercussions for students and faculty who disobeyed.
Nanda and co-counsel Mustafa Farooq are asking the Court of King’s Bench to affirm that these violations of his clients’ Charter rights don’t meet the limitations outlined in section 1.
The application is being heard in court on June 10.
Livestream Tomorrow on Consolidation in the Resource Sector
Before you go, I want to give you a heads up about a livestream I’m doing here tomorrow at noon MDT with Do Not Pass Go by Peter Nowak.
There’s been lots of mergers and acquisitions in Canada’s oil, gas and mining industries over the past year. Who better to help me make sense of it than Nowak, whose newsletter deals specifically with corporate monopolies?
You can access the livestream right here to join us in the chat. If you can’t make it, I’ll have it out in podcast form soon after.