The Air India Report and The Regulation of Charities and Terrorism Financing

I Introduction

In 1985, a luggage bomb planted in Vancouver blew up Air India Flight 182 over the Atlantic Ocean near Ireland. The bomb killed all 329 people aboard, 280 of them Canadians. The same day, a bomb destined for a second Air India flight killed two baggage handlers at Tokyo’s Narita airport. These simultaneous bombings by a Vancouver-based conspiracy were a precursor to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Grievances a world away, in this case against the government of India for its attacks on the Golden Temple, the holiest site in the Sikh religion, inspired terrorism in a western democracy. Modern technology was used to produce mass causalities. Until 11 September 2001, the Air India bombings were the world’s most deadly act of aviation terrorism.

Canadians were slow to learn lessons from the horrors of the Air India bombings. The government of India immediately appointed a public inquiry, but for many Canadians, the Air India bombing was a foreign matter. A massive Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) investigation was plagued by problems. It resulted in the conviction of only one person – Inderjit Singh Reyat – on just two charges of manslaughter and one of perjury. ¹ The Canadian government did not call a full public inquiry, the Commission of Inquiry into the Investigation of the Bombing of Air India Flight 182, until 2006. In June 2010, the inquiry report was released, containing five volumes outlining a wide range of deficiencies in Canada’s response both before and after the bombing. One volume of the report, but none of the Commission’s twenty-nine recommendations, was devoted to the prevention of terrorism financing, including financing from charities. The special focus feature will focus on this aspect of the Commission’s work and mandate.

The Air India inquiry had a massive mandate to investigate whether there were deficiencies in Canada’s assessment of the threat of terrorism before the bombing and in effective co-operation among government agencies in the investigation of the bombing. After prolonged hearings that included battles with the government over access to secret information, this part of the inquiry resulted in a volume of over 1 200 pages, which outlined numerous failures in the pre- and post-bombing phases. They included inadequate sharing of intelligence that should have identified the threat to Flight 182, the only Air India flight at that time that departed from Canada, and problems of co-operation between the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the RCMP that hindered and delayed the investigation. ²

The Air India inquiry was, however, not only concerned with the past. The inquiry was given an extensive forward-looking mandate that produced additional volumes on the challenges of terrorism prosecutions, including the relationship between, intelligence and evidence, and witness protection, ³ aviation security, ⁴ and terrorism financing, including any misuse of funds from charities. ⁵ This last part of the mandate responded to concerns about the charitable status granted to the Babbar Khalsa (BK), a Sikh group that demanded (and still demands) the creation of Khalistan as a Sikh nation and its separation from India. The BK was founded by Talwinder Singh Parmar, widely believed to be the mastermind of the Air India bombings, and it is a proscribed terrorist group both in Canada and elsewhere. The BK, ‘which both CSIS and the RCMP believed to be centrally implicated in the Narita and Air India bombings and terrorist acts and plots in both Canada and India, managed to obtain charitable status in the early 1990’s, although its charitable status was revoked in 1996.’ ⁶

The focus on terrorism financing also recognized the prominence that has been given to terrorism financing since 11 September 2001. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1373, for example, called on all states under the mandatory provisions of chapter 7 of the UN Charter to ensure that the financing of terrorism was a crime. ⁷

This focus feature builds on an innovative dimension of the Air India commission’s approach to its work. In order to tackle its mandate...