Another rotten brick in the wall

...falls to the ground. After more than six years, including two in prison, Adil Charkaoui is today a free man. All bail conditions have been lifted, and the judge in the case, Justice Daniele Tremblay-Lamer, has announced her intention to halt deportation proceedings.

It's been quite a tangled tale, one that the Globe & Mail's Colin Freeze sums up here. But it's not necessarily concluded. The government plans to appeal the judge's ruling in the case that secret evidence be publicly disclosed. In her estimation, having reviewed it, doing so would not pose a threat to national security.

Given her ruling, that evidence was withdrawn by lawyers for the Department of Justice, undercutting the rationale for a security certificate. The tarnished Canadian Security Intelligence Service, meanwhile, is sticking to its guns, insisting that Charkaoui is a security risk.

Should the appeal succeed, the government could hit the reset button and issue a new security certificate, although these certificates may now be a dead letter. But at this point, yet another blow has been struck by the courts for natural justice.