Space X rocket Falcon 9 as it takes off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, June 28, 2015. Photo by BRUCE WEAVER / AFP / Getty Images
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Buried deep in legislation to implement Canada’s federal budget for 2022 is an amendment to the Penal Code that will explicitly extend Canadian criminal jurisdiction around the world.
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“A Canadian crew member who, during a space flight, commits an act or omission outside of Canada that, if committed in Canada, would be charged with a felony, is considered to have committed that act or omission in Canada,” the report said. measure contained in Bill C-19, the 443-page document implementing the provisions of the 2022 federal budget. Basically, the amendment means that if a Canadian commits a criminal offense while in space, they will be handcuffed as soon as they return. It also probably means that Canadians can currently kill and rob whatever they want, as long as they do it while on track. The technical illegality of the site is a problem that has been identified by legal scholars for quite some time. The issue came to the fore in 2019, when an American astronaut serving on the International Space Station was accused of committing the first space crime in history.
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Astronaut Anne McClain has been accused by her estranged husband, Summer Worden, of illegally using an ISS computer to gain access to Worden’s electronic banking records – which Worden claimed was a form of identity theft. The allegations were later found to be false and Worden is now accused of lying to US investigators. Since 1985, nine Canadians have gone into space on missions funded by the Canadian Space Agency. This includes Julie Payette, the recently resigned Governor-General of Canada, and Chris Hadfield, whose management of the International Space Station in 2013 turned him into a celebrity astronaut. The nine astronauts were all highly trained civil servants committed to a whole web of professional and international standards designed to keep them in check.
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In the case of the International Space Station, criminal jurisdiction is bound by the 1998 Treaty establishing the structure, which has been signed by Canada. Article 22 of the Treaty stipulates that anyone boarding the station is subject to the criminal jurisdiction of their country of origin. But even then, it remains a dirty gray area in case an astronaut commits a crime against an astronaut from a different country. In this case, the treaty merely advises the countries of the two astronauts to discuss their “respective prosecutorial interests”. But the legal framework of space is changing as it becomes more and more crowded with private space travelers. Earlier this month, Canadian businessman Mark Pathy was on Axiom Mission 1, the first fully private mission in history on the International Space Station.
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Canadian businessman Mark Pathy in his office with a model of the SpaceX spacecraft in Montreal. Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS / Paul Chiasson If Pathy had committed crimes while on the International Space Station, he would simply have been indicted by Canada under the ISS of 1998. However, if the crime had been committed in the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that carried Pathi to the station, could possibly have been created for a jurisdiction nightmare. Canada has been involved in a legal scenario of this kind in the past, although it concerned the legally unclear jurisdiction of an iceberg and not of space. In 1970, a U.S. citizen living at a research station on a floating layer of ice shot to death a fellow researcher in a dispute over a stolen bottle of homemade wine. Both the defendant and the victim were U.S. citizens living in a U.S. facility, but the iceberg happened to be inside Canadian territory at the time of the crime.
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Canada eventually relinquished its jurisdiction over the case, but the case frightened U.S. authorities into passing a 1984 law criminalizing its citizens if the alleged crime was committed “outside the jurisdiction of any nation.” The amendment to the Penal Code included in the 2022 budget was made specifically to prepare for Canada’s involvement in the Lunar Gateway, a NASA mission to create a permanent space station in lunar orbit. Ottawa had previously boasted that its involvement in the mission would mean that Canada would become only the second nation in history to send one of its nationals beyond Earth orbit. The amendment explicitly states that Canadian criminal jurisdiction will apply to the lunar station itself and any “means of transport” to the station. And in any case, “on the surface of the moon”.
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