Among his many complaints, Tanzirul Alam filed a grievance saying the lack of books in Bengali violated his charter rights and did not reflect the linguistic diversity of inmates
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An inmate serving time for child pornography and sexually assaulting minors returned a book about court rules to his B.C. prison’s library and borrowed another book, one in his native Bengali language, before he filed his lawsuit against the prison for not providing him Bengali books.
Tanzirul Alam, 34, has been in Matsqui Institution in British Columbia since shortly after he was sentenced in Calgary in 2017 for luring three underaged girls and sexually assaulting them, some of which was recorded on video and shared on the internet.
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I’m a victim of a system that is not perfect
Tanzirul Alam
“I’m a victim of a system that is not perfect,” Alam told the judge at his sentencing hearing, complaining the government of Canada didn’t tell him child sex was illegal in Canada when he immigrated from Bangladesh.
Alam has been complaining about many things.
After filing a doomed appeal of his conviction, he filed a lawsuit in Federal Court in 2019 over his transfer from Bowden Institution in Alberta to Matsqui. Despite his loss, he argued and appealed over rules, schedules and timing until it was all dismissed last year.
In 2021, he sued Canada’s Attorney General, in B.C. court, complaining about his access to computers and recreation time, in which he demanded he be placed in a lower-security prison. He lost that, too.
In between those battles, he started complaining about the prison library.
He filed a grievance with the warden in 2020 that Matsqui’s prison library didn’t have any books in the Bengali language.
Alam said it violated his charter rights because the collection was mainly in English and French and did not reflect the linguistic diversity of inmates.
The Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) replied, saying books were always provided in Canada’s official languages and prisons try to have materials in the majority language within any specific institution, but not every prison can have books in every language because of financial restrictions.
There was at least one book in Bengali there, the prison said, according to court records. Others were available through a regional collection that could be requested, but he had not done so.
CSC’s Ethno-Cultural Services nonetheless bought 10 more Bengali language books for west-coast inmates that could be requested on an inter-library loan.
In 2021, Alam returned a copy of a book called Federal Courts Practice 2019, and took out an unnamed Bengali language book, court records show.
Two months later, he filed a case with the Federal Court complaining of the prison’s response to his complaint about access to Bengali-language books. Alam, not represented by a lawyer, filed a 26-page Notice of Application, described by the court as “not the model of clarity.”
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His application was rejected by the court because he had not waited for his grievance to CSC to be decided before appealing it.
Then he appealed that rejection by the court.
This week, Justice Simon Fothergill issued a decision on Alam’s appeal.
The previous court decision “was procedurally fair, factually supported, and legally correct,” Fothergill said in his 20-page examination of the case.
He ordered Alam to pay $750 in costs to CSC.
During Alam’s Calgary trial in 2017, court heard that while he was detained in the Calgary Remand Centre awaiting trial, Alam made hundreds of phone calls to one of his teenaged victims to convince her to lie for him in court.
“The conduct of his communication was egregious … his disdain for the no-contact rule was obvious,” prosecutor Donna Spaner told the judge at his sentencing, asking that this disqualify Alam from receiving a sentence reduction for his time served prior to trial.
Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Sandy Park reduced some of Alam’s credit for time served from the usual 1.5 days for every day in custody to 1.25 days, reducing his 12-year sentence to eight years and eight months.
Alam was convicted of 17 charges, involving three girls aged 14 and 15, including sexual assault, sexual contact with a person under 16, luring, making and transmitting child pornography, and obstruction of justice.
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