VIETNAMESE JUSTICE

Withdrawing Canada's ambassador from Vietnam and snubbing the festivities
marking the end of the Vietnam war 25 years ago, are welcome expressions of
anger at the execution of a Canadian citizen there.

But we have given the Vietnamese $100 million in aid in the past decade, and
last year we bought $150 million more goods from them, than they sold us.

That friendly business needs rethinking, following the execution of Nguyen
Thi Hiep, a Toronto woman condemned to die for drug trafficking.

Canadian officials think Nguyen may have been duped into carrying heroin
hidden in her baggage. There's doubt enough to have warranted clemency and a
commutation of her sentence. Yet Vietnam executed her even as she protested
her innocence.

A one-party Communist regime that is so dismissive of our views, and which
has killed one of our citizens in a dubious case, deserves no consideration
from us.

Nguyen's tragedy is irreversible, but we can learn from it.

Back in 1991, Brian Mulroney's government all but encouraged countries like
Vietnam to execute Canadians, when it bowed to American pressure to
extradite accused murderers to face the death penalty there.

Prior to 1991 we extradited only if U.S. prosectors agreed to settle for
prison terms, not death. Like most democracies, Canada regards the death
penalty as a barbaric and ineffective deterrent. We've banned it.

The Nguyen case differs in that she was arrested in Vietnam.

But Ottawa's acquiescence in extraditing our citizens for trial and possible
execution in the U.S. perversely legitimizes the procedure elsewhere.

How can we credibly demand clemency for a Canadian who trafficks in drugs in
Vietnam, or who commits adultery in Afghanistan? The short answer is, we
can't.

Ottawa's policy legitimizes barbarism. It should be scrapped.