Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Canadian Political Free-for-All -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proud Deplorable who wrote (13762)	12/21/2009 12:26:07 AM
From: average joe	Respond to of 37826

Woman to file human rights complaint after airport strip search Charmaine Archer, 42, was strip searched on her return from her grandmother's funeral in Jamaica by Ottawa border services agents who claimed to have found traces of heroin and marijuana on her toothbrush. OTTAWA — A Canadian woman who was strip-searched at the Ottawa Airport after returning from her grandmother’s funeral in Jamaica has decided to launch a human rights complaint. Charmaine Archer, who holds dual citizenship with Jamaica, said she hopes her complaint will result in an investigation to prove that a report that traces of heroin and THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, were found on her toothbrush was fabricated to justify the strip search. “If you swab everything and look at everything and find no traces of drugs, why do you have to search me?” Archer said. She said Canadian customs agents told her she was being flagged because she had purchased her ticket to Jamaica at the last minute and had stayed only four days. Instead, she believes she was flagged because of her race and country of origin. “I was the only black person on that flight and I was the only one in there being searched,” she said, of the flight from Philadelphia to Ottawa, the final leg of her trip home from Jamaica. “I have all reason to assume it was racial profiling.” After being taken aside, she said she was compliant with the guards up until they told her she must submit to a strip search or be arrested. “Arrest me then,” she said she told them, but was taken in to be searched regardless. She said another goal in making a human rights complaint is to have the surveillance videos made public to show that she had done all that was asked of her up until she was told she would be searched. Despite the reported traces on her toothbrush, Archer says the search should have stopped when no other evidence of drugs was found among her belongings. She has contacted the Canadian Human Rights Commission and expects to hear back within the week to begin filing an official complaint. leaderpost.com