April 7, 2009

Its Tuesday, April 7th.

Iran says it would consider participating in a global nuclear fuel bank designed to keep uranium enrichment under strict control.

Currently, Iran says it's especially interested if U.S. style banking regulations are applied to the nuke bank.

This is The Current.

Cameras at Crime Scenes - Photographer

This past Sunday, newspaper photographer Jason Payne arrived at a crime scene in Vancouver and began taking pictures. A Vancouver Police officer had shot a man who was allegedly driving a stolen vehicle.

But after Jason Payne had snapped a few shots, an officer approached him and seized his camera. It was later returned. And a spokesperson with the Vancouver Police Department has since apologized for the incident. It's not the first time something like this has happened. Two weeks ago, the Vancouver Police seized a cell-phone belonging to a witness who says he digitally recorded a fatal police shooting. The witness says the cell phone was returned, but without the footage he had shot.

The Vancouver Police have raised questions about the witness' version of events -- including whether the video ever existed. But civil liberties advocates say they're getting increasingly concerned about how the Vancouver Police deal with situations where people photograph them in action. Jason Payne is a news photographer with the Vancouver Province newspaper and he was in Vancouver.

Cameras at Crime Scenes - Police Confiscation

The Vancouver Police Department has issued a statement saying that it is not the department's policy to take cameras or video equipment from the media. And Constable Janna McGuinness, a spokesperson for the department, addressed the issue at a press conference yesterday. We aired a clip.

Civil liberties advocates say they're hearing a lot of stories and allegations about police seizing cellphones containing photographs and video footage. David Eby is a lawyer and the Acting Executive Director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. He was in our Vancouver studio.

Drugs & Banks - United Nations

As the extent of the global financial crisis became clear last fall. One of the biggest problems facing the world's banks was a lack of paper money, actual cash as opposed to investments or assets. All over the world, banks were scrambling to find sources of hard currency.

And according to the United Nations' Office on Drugs and Crime, some of the money that some banks ended up with came from the illegal drug trade. And the world's drug cartels are finding that a global economic crisis is a great time for them to do business.

Antonio Maria Costa is the Executive Director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime and he was in Vienna, Austria.

Drugs & Banks - Blum

The economic crisis may have made it easier for drug money to infiltrate the global banking system. But according to Jack Blum, this is hardly the first time it has happened. He's a lawyer and a leading authority on economic crime.

In the late 1980's he was the chief investigator for U.S. Senator John Kerry's Foreign Relations subcommittee. It was his investigation that helped bring down the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a bank involved in fraud in the billions of dollars, money laundering world-wide as well as evading any form of government regulation. Jack Blum was in Washington, DC.

Kafka Promo

Later this week on The Current, we'll revisit the story of Abousfian Abdelrazik. He's a Canadian, originally from Sudan and he's been stranded in Sudan for the last six years. He was accused of supporting Al Qaida and jailed twice, picked up according to Canadian documents at the behest of Canada.

Both the RCMP and CSIS have cleared him of any criminal wrong-doing but despite that the government insists that Mr. Abdelrazik is a security risk and will not give him a passport to fly home. He's been sleeping on a cot at the Canadian Embassy in Khartoum the last 11 months. His story has inspired comparisons to Franz Kafka's novel The Trial.

Later this week on The Current, we will look at Abousfian Abdelrazik's case through the lens of Kafka.

Decriminalizing Incest - German Law

We started this segment with a clip of Pierre Trudea back when he was Justice Minister in 1967, making the argument that there is "No place for the State in the bedrooms of the Nation."

Since then, the Criminal Code has largely stayed out of Canadians' bedrooms ... except for a few things, incest being the most prominent. However, consensual incest amoung adults is not a crime in France, Spain, Portugal or the Netherlands. In Norway, siblings are permitted to marry. Romania is now considering following its EU cousins on this.

The very idea of decriminalizing incest among adults probably shocks a lot of sensibilities. But for others, it's just the logical extension of the principle Pierre Trudeau presented back in 1967. Joachim Renzikowski is a criminal law professor at Halle University in Germany. He helped draft an appeal to the European Court on behalf of a brother and sister in Germany who were given jail time for their incestuous marriage. Joachim Renzikowski was in Tubingen, Germany.

Decriminalizing Incest - Ethical Debate

The question of what role our laws should play in defining and enforcing our social mores is one that has preoccupied philosophers and ethicists alike for centuries.

For their thoughts, we were joined by Margaret Somerville. She's the founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law and she was in Montreal. And Graham Mayeda is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa. He was in Ottawa.