The Dominion - Refugees

Roma Refused

Tim McSorley — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:18:22 +0000

Changes to refugee law shut doors to persecuted minority

TORONTO—The Roma Community Centre's one-room office, located on the ground floor of the Crossways Plaza in Toronto, has been operating in this location since October 2011. Founded in 1997 after the arrival of over 3,000 Czech Roma refugees in Canada, the RCC is the only organization for Roma operating in Toronto. Originally based out of the office of Culturelink, an immigrant settlement organization, the new space now hosts a number of different programs including a weekly English as a Second Language class, a women's support group and immigration counselling.

According to Gina Csanyi, Executive Director of the RCC, since acquiring the new office space there has been a dramatic rise in the number of people coming to the centre—around 20 per day—mostly Roma from Hungary. Csanyi said, “as things become progressively worse in Hungary more and more are fleeing.”

The Roma, more commonly known in the English-speaking world as Gypsies, are Europe’s largest minority with an estimated 8 to 12 million living in Europe, the majority in Central and Eastern Europe. Roma trace their roots back to northern India and are said to have left their home country and migrated west over 1,000 years ago. Throughout their long history in Europe they have been subjected to slavery, exiled, killed, used as scapegoats and have been historically marginalized in almost every country they have settled in. During the Second World War military officials sent the Roma living in Nazi-occupied countries en masse to concentration camps. Seven thousand Roma lived in the Czech Republic before the Second World War; less than 600 survived.

Today they suffer low employment rates, low education levels, lack of access to government services and health care, poverty, segregation and violent crimes perpetrated by neo-Nazis and skinheads. Forced school segregation programs and state removal of children affect Roma families in some jurisdictions.

Since 1997, thousands of Roma have been seeking asylum in Canada, the first wave coming from the Czech Republic, quickly followed by Roma from Hungary, and to a lesser degree Slovakia and Romania. Currently the largest group of Roma seeking asylum in Canada are from Hungary.

In recent years, changes to visa requirements and changes to immigration and refugee laws have created significant challenges to those wishing to immigrate here, leading to a massive decrease in the number of Roma accepted as refugees.

I met Robert and Monika, two volunteers, in the Roma Community Center on a Friday afternoon. They were helping organize the Hungarian Roma community.

According to Robert, a Hungarian Roma who came to Canada with his wife and child in 2010, one of the major problems in Hungary is that Roma are afraid to speak up about the persecution and discrimination they face because they have little support. Members of the police and government are intolerant of his people, he says. A far-right nationalist party that specifically targets Roma and Jews has grown into the third largest political party in the country and has spearheaded anti-Roma legislation. If Roma were to speak up, says Robert, they could lose their jobs and neo-Nazi groups would threaten them. The risk and insecurity prompted Robert and his family to flee the country. “I never want to go back,” he says. He and his family are waiting for their refugee court hearing to determine whether or not they can stay in Canada.

For many Hungarian Roma, applying for asylum in Canada is their last hope at finding a safe place to raise a family. Monika, another Hungarian Roma who came to Canada with her husband and 2 children said, “We had to sell everything to come here: our house, everything. We have no place to go if we return.”

According to Csanyi there are a number of obstacles the Hungarian Roma face when coming to Canada such as a lack of understanding of the rigorous process of the refugee system and what documents are expected for each refugee case such as police and medical records. It is often difficult for Roma to obtain these papers in their home countries because of police and state discrimination.

In Toronto, lawyers profiteering on the refugee claims of Hungarian Roma are also becoming an issue. “When I meet a client and see who their lawyer is I immediately know if they are going to have a successful claim or not,” says Csanyi. “These lawyers don’t even meet their clients. They cut and paste PIFF forms, have an almost 0 acceptance rate, stretch out the case for years and once legal aid runs out they drop the clients.” This severely affects the chance of a successful outcome in the hearing.

The recent history of Roma immigration to Canada has been a complex one, which Csanyi and others say has been aggravated by immigration legislation such as Bill C-11 and the newly proposed Bill C-31.

The latest Roma immigration wave began in 1997, as rates of neo-Nazi attacks and discrimination in their home countries increased. At first the Immigration and Refugee Board largely granted the Roma refugee status based on the evidence of systematic and long-term persecution in the Czech Republic and Hungary. The acceptance rate for Hungarian Roma before 1998 was around 78%.

As the number of Hungarian Roma refugees increased in 1998, the Immigration and Refugee Board organized an unprecedented examination of the overall conditions in Hungary that would be used in deciding other Hungarian Roma refugee cases. This is the only time such an investigation, known as a “lead case,” has been carried out in the history of the IRB.

The lead case involved two families and the tribunal decided that the conditions in Hungary did not amount to persecution and denied the claimants refugee status. The result was that acceptance rates for Hungarian Roma dropped from 70 per cent to 8 per cent from 1998 to 1999.

On March 27, 2006, the lead case was overturned by the Federal Court of Appeal on the basis that it was designed solely to limit the number of Hungarian Roma accepted as refugees in Canada. From 1998 to 2006, more than 10,000 Hungarian Roma refugees were rejected and deported back to Hungary.

Newly appointed Immigration Minister Jason Kenney publicly vocalized the idea that refugee claims made by European citizens were illegitimate. Starting in 2008, the term “bogus refugee” became synonymous with refugees coming from so-called “democratic” countries. This had a strong impact on the outcome of refugee claims made by Roma coming from Eastern Europe. In 2008 the acceptance rate for Czech Roma was 94 per cent. After these public statements the acceptance rate plummeted to 10 per cent in 2010.

Soon after, the government established new visa requirements for Czech residents (as well as Mexican residents), drastically limiting them from coming to Canada and applying for refugee status.

Kenney's targeting of Roma refugees sparked legal action in the Roma community. Rocco Galati, a Toronto-based immigrant lawyer, and the Czech Roma community launched a lawsuit against Kenney accusing him of blatantly undermining the Immigration and Refugee Board's independent tribunal process by spreading bias against the Roma. Court action is ongoing.

Despite these difficulties, last year there were 4,423 new refugee claims in Canada made by Roma from Hungary, with 5,975 cases still pending. While Hungary is currently the country with the highest refugee claims made in Canada, its acceptance rates are one of the lowest. The 2011 acceptance rate of refugee claims from Hungary was 18.3 per cent compared to the national average acceptance rates, which was 44.6 per cent. The average wait time for a hearing is 3 years, forcing many people to live in uncertainty long-term. Many point to immigration legislation and institutional bias against the Roma as the reason for these low acceptance rates.

The Balanced Refugee Reform Act (Bill C-11) passed in 2010 under a minority Conservative Government. At the time of adoption, some of the more contentious parts of the legislation were removed in order to satisfy opposition party demands, only to resurface in the Conservative Government's latest immigration bill, C-31.

Kenney has said he hopes to see Bill C-31, named Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act, passed by June 2012. Bill C-31 is an omnibus bill that incorporates aspects of several previously proposed pieces of legislation. The new laws would allow the detention of “irregular arrivals”—those who arrive by boat, for example—without a warrant or an appeal. It would also grant the Minister of Immigration sole authority to set a list of “safe countries,” which are deemed to be capable of protecting their citizens. This would limit the ability of residents of these countries to apply for refugee status and would revoke their option to appeal a rejection. They would also only be given 15 days to prepare and file their written statement which sets the basis of their claim, leaving little time to find legal counsel and translation.

Julianna Beaudoin, a PhD student at the University of Western Ontario, has been researching Roma and human rights issues since 2002, specifically focusing on the Canadian IRB and immigration policies. “Bill C-31 is yet another way the Canadian government is trying to reinforce the notion that there is a 'queue' for refugees, and groups like Roma who are taking active roles in trying to escape persecution and violence are 'jumping the queue,'” says Beaudoin. According to Beaudoin, Canada, as a signatory to the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, has an obligation to provide Roma with a fair refugee hearing.

According to the government, assignment to the safe country list will only come after investigation, though there are questions as to whether other factors could be at play. Syed Hussan, an organizer with the immigrant and refugee rights organization No One is Illegal, argues that “safe country” legislation is linked to economic factors and trade agreements that Canada has signed or is negotiating. In particular, Canada is currently negotiating the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) with the European Union. Hungary is a member and held the presidency last year.

Critics question Canada's willingness and ability to accept refugees from countries with which it has signed trade agreements, since such economic affiliations often tacitly show support for a country's political system as well. Placing these countries on the “safe country” list gives the Canadian government the power to turn away large numbers of refugees. “We call this bill the Refugee Exclusion Act,” says Hussan. “This bill gives [immigration officers] massive powers of detention [of] anyone who is not a citizen and demolishes all the key pillars of a permanent refugee system. If citizenship can be taken away at the whim of a government we are in deep trouble.”

Kristyna Balaban is a Toronto-based documentary filmmaker, photographer, and a member of the Toronto Media Co-op, which produced this piece.

Toronto Roma vigil

Abousfian Abdelrazik's Statement to the UN 1267 Committee

shainaagbayani — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 19:29:49 +0000

Abousfian Abdelrazik delivers a message to the UN 1267 list committee about the hardships he endures daily.

(video ID here: http://www.vimeo.com/25236316)

Once, We Welcomed Tamil Refugees

Tim McSorley — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 05:16:59 +0000

Twenty-five years later, Canada jails "boat people"

MONTREAL—"We thought we were going to die...because we were not seeing any land, or light, or any boat or anything."

Sooriyakumaran Sathananthan was among more than 150 Tamil asylum-seekers discovered in a pair of crammed lifeboats off the coast of Newfoundland in August, 1986.

The Tamil refugees, who had fled persecution in Sri Lanka, were quickly granted work permits by Canadian authorities.

Nearly a quarter-century later, when another boatload of Tamil migrants reached this country’s shores, Canada responded differently.

Of the 492 Tamil refugee claimants who arrived in August 2010 on the MV Sun Sea, nearly all were detained by Canadian immigration authorities; some remain in custody.

In the wake of the Sun Sea's arrival, the Canadian government has pledged to pass a bill that critics say will punish refugees deemed "illegal," with measures including a one-year mandatory jail sentence without judicial review.

"We see a very different government now," says David Poopalapillai, spokesperson for the Canadian Tamil Congress. "The compassion is not there."

Today, Sathananthan works full-time as a delivery truck driver in Toronto. Over the years, he sent remittances back to Sri Lanka, and sponsored several family members to come to Canada as refugees. He says he's happy to have built a better life for them. But his road to asylum was long and difficult.

In the early 1980s, still living in Sri Lanka, he was forced to drop out of school after the death of his father. He worked as a farmer to support his mother and four siblings, but life in the South Asian island country became unbearable when civil war erupted in 1983.

The government of Sri Lanka—under the control of an elite group of Sinhala Buddhist nationalists—had persecuted the Tamil-speaking population for decades. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, took up arms, demanding national independence. Atrocities were committed on both sides, with civilians caught in the middle.

"So many people died then," Sathananthan recalls.

He fled the country with his cousin to seek a better life abroad, first traveling to Yemen. But work there was scarce.

"That's when people said, you have to go to Canada," he says. "Your family will have a better life."

Sathananthan and his cousin flew to East Germany before crossing the Iron Curtain into West Germany. In July 1986, they embarked for Canada on the freighter Aurigae with more than 150 other Tamils.

Sathananthan said they spent about two weeks at sea before the captain of the crowded cargo ship set the migrants adrift in two lifeboats. For nearly three days they drifted with no sign of land.

"We didn't have any food, any water...we [were] thinking we were going to pass away," he says.

They were finally spotted by fishermen and brought ashore by Canadian officials on August 11, 1986. Upon their arrival, the migrants were met with enormous media coverage and an outpouring of public sympathy.

The asylum-seekers were released within days and quickly granted work permits.

"There was no aggressive detention," says Peter Showler, director of the Refugee Forum, an Ottawa-based think tank.

Two-and-a-half decades later, the federal government has adopted a harsh stance aimed at discouraging "illegal migrants" from entering Canada by sea in the wake of the MV Sun Sea's arrival, Showler says.

"The government clearly has admitted that they have got this aggressive detention policy because they want to deter additional boats from coming," he says.

As of May 30, 2011, the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) had ordered the deportation of four of the Sun Sea migrants, on the grounds that they were members of the LTTE, a group also known as the Tamil Tigers.

The Harper government listed the LTTE as a terrorist organization in 2006.

In March 2011, when the IRB ordered the deportation of one of the migrants—whose name cannot be released due to a publication ban—Public Safety Minister Vic Toews called the decision "an unmitigated victory for the rule of law."

Critics say the government is making criminals out of refugees, while downplaying the atrocities committed by the Sri Lankan state.

"When we're talking about violence committed by resistance movements, we're talking about violence that imperialism is quick to condemn, because state violence is never considered terrorism, when in fact it's the greatest form of terrorism," says Harsha Walia, an organizer with migrant justice group No-One Is Illegal.

Activists from the group began organizing to support the MV Sun Sea migrants even before Canadian authorities boarded the boat last August near Victoria, BC. The group opposed what Walia calls a climate of xenophobia fueled by the Harper government and mainstream media.

"There's a particular hysteria about boats arriving...coupled with the post 9/11 climate, and the criminalizing and the fear-mongering around terrorism," she says.

Janet Dench, executive director for the Canadian Council for Refugees, says the government has exaggerated the threat posed by the asylum-seekers to win political mileage.

"You condemn the Tigers for their bad deeds, but you don't take an equal position on emphasizing the abuses that many Tamils themselves have suffered at the hands of the Sri Lankan government," Dench says.

Lawyers for the Canada Border Services Agency have stated in IRB hearings that anyone who did business with the Tigers—including, in one case, a rice farmer who sold crops to the LTTE—should be considered inadmissible to Canada.

Critics say that since the LTTE acted as a de facto government in predominantly Tamil areas of Sri Lanka, with a military and police force at its disposal, it was practically impossible to avoid dealing with the group.

"Many of the Tamils who make refugee claims, they make claims against the Tigers," Dench says. "And yet you don't hear any sympathy for the Tamils who have suffered abuse at the hands of the Tigers, and they're asking for our protection on that basis."

The civil war that displaced Sathananthan and his family officially ended in 2009, amidst reports of mass civilian casualties at the hands of the Sri Lankan military and the LTTE.

Since then, the UN's refugee agency has noted improvements in the human rights situation in Sri Lanka.

But hundreds of Tamils suspected of affiliating with the LTTE are arbitrarily arrested annually and detained for months or years without charge, according to a report released in February 2011 by Amnesty International. Many are tortured in custody, the report adds.

Thousands of Tamil civilians live under military surveillance in "open air prisons" in the country's northeast, according to Ajay Parasram, a doctoral student researching Sri Lankan politics at Carleton University.

"I think that's especially concerning because really the civil war was about the systematic exclusion and subordination of the Tamil people," he says.

As migrants from Sri Lanka continue to seek refuge abroad, the federal Conservative Party has pledged to pass a bill that would keep people designated as "irregular arrivals" in jail for at least one year upon their arrival, without any chance for judicial review of their detention.

The Liberals, Bloc Quebecois and New Democrats vowed to oppose Bill C-49—which the NDP's then-immigration critic dubbed the "attack refugees bill"—when it was first introduced to the House of Commons by Vic Toews last October.

Harper now appears poised to impose the reforms, which he says will deter migrants who attempt to "jump the immigration queue."

Critics say the notion that asylum-seekers must wait in line for asylum violates international agreements including the 1951 Refugee Convention, of which Canada is a signatory.

"There's no queue," Poopalapillai says. "When you have the fear that you're being persecuted, you're being raped, you're being jailed, you're being gunned down, do you have the time to go...and ask for a visa?"

Groups of migrants designated as "irregular" by the government would also be barred from receiving permanent residency status for five years, leaving them in a state of legal limbo. University of Victoria refugee law specialist Donald Galloway calls the government's reforms "anti-humanitarian."

"What they're recognizing is that if somebody is found to be a genuine refugee, but hasn't been given permanent resident status, we can always take the refugee status away," Galloway says.

"You're not going to be able to get long-term work, you're not going to be able to get a credit rating in this country, you're not going to be able to settle down, or buy yourself a home," he adds.

He also noted that the bill would apply retroactively, giving the government discretionary power to name the Sun Sea migrants and others as "irregular."

"It seems that this is a level of viciousness, of anti-humanitarian venom, that we haven't seen before," he says.

Walia says activists should oppose C-49 while building an anti-racist culture.

"They're not just policies," she says. "They exist in climate of racism, xenophobia, and anti-migrant sentiment."

David Koch is a freelance reporter and a journalism student living in Ottawa.

Tamil children

tamil noise

Into the Fire

Martin Lukacs — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 06:18:32 +0000

Deportation ends Salvadoran family's long wait for asylum in Canada

MONTREAL—Ever since Canada deported her family to El Salvador in December 2010, Jessica Vides says she fears for her life—and the lives of her young children.

“I am afraid to leave the house. The children can't go to school,” said the mother of three, two of whom are Canadian citizens, in a telephone interview from San Salvador, El Salvador's capital.

She and her husband, Eduardo Vides, fled their native country of El Salvador five years ago, she said, due to death threats from one of the country's notorious street gangs. Now that the family is back in San Salvador, she says the death threats have returned with a vengeance.

Two weeks after they were deported, Jessica Vides said the family received a menacing visit from men they suspect are gang members, who threatened to kill them if they failed to pay thousands of dollars.

“We all hid in a room at the back of the house,” she told The Dominion.

Such threats are exactly why she says the family left their home in San Salvador in the first place, and sought refuge in Canada.

But the peaceful refuge they’d dreamed of turned into a nightmare five years after they settled in Montreal. The family’s plight in the hands of Canadian immigration authorities raises serious concerns about Canada’s refugee policy. The Vides family accuses authorities of injuring their child while she clung to her dad as he was being carted off to an immigrant detention centre.

Eduardo Vides’s difficulties began when, as a passerby, he randomly witnessed the assassination of a woman on the street in San Salvador five years ago. Men he suspected were gang members soon started following him, he said in an interview with The Dominion.

Then the death threats started. He was warned that if he did not pay thousands of dollars, his whole family would be killed.

“I didn’t have the money,” he said. And so the family fled, escaping to Guatemala, and from there, to several US cities. In Buffalo, New York, with the help of a nonprofit group called Vive el Casa, they came to Canada as refugee claimants, according to Jessica Vides.

When they arrived in Canada, their first-born child, Eduarda, was just one year old. While awaiting a final decision on their asylum claim and subsequent judicial review of the decision, years passed. While they waited, Jessica and her husband established a home on Crevier Street in Montreal's Ville St. Laurent neighbourhood, where they had two more children: Andrea, now aged five, and Gustavo, now aged two. Originally trained as a pilot, Eduardo Vides found industrial maintenance work through an agency.

But their asylum claim was eventually rejected. Canada has in the past accepted Salvadoran refugees fleeing gang violence. However, given that asylum claims are heard before a single member of the Immigration and Refugee Board, it is, to some extent, the “luck of the draw,” according to Janet Dench, the executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR).

The Vides family went to Federal Court for a judicial review, but after a long wait, they learned that the verdict on that too was negative.

At a November 23, 2010, meeting at Citizenship and Immigration Canada's offices in downtown Montreal, Eduardo Vides was informed that the family was slated to be deported three weeks later. Vides said he pleaded at the meeting for the government to allow the family to stay until his daughter had completed her school year. Eduarda Vides, who is now seven years old, was enrolled as a first-grade student at Ville St. Laurent's Bois Franc-Aquarelle elementary school, and her dad had been working for more than a year at job repairing boilers, when the government ordered the family's deportation.

According to Vides, they responded by arresting him on the spot.

Three weeks later, in an interview with The Dominion, it was still difficult for Eduardo Vides to speak about the events of that fateful day. The slim man with gentle mannerisms spoke with a shaky voice about how his seven-year-old daughter, who was present at the meeting and witnessed the emotional exchange between her father and the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) agents, had thrown her arms around him. He recalled with a pained expression, “She hugged me, [and] I hugged her back.”

According to Vides, two male immigration agents grabbed him—from either side, an officer clamped onto his arms.

A third, female, officer grabbed the frightened first-grader. The girl “held on hard with her arms,” her father recounted.

Vides claims that the female officer injured his daughter as she wrestled the seven-year-old girl off of him. She had “wounds all over her back, stomach, and also scars on her leg,” he said. “She couldn't walk.”

Meanwhile, Canadian immigration agents hauled Eduardo Vides off to the CBSA's Laval detention center.

Reached by telephone for comment, Dominique McNealy, a CBSA agent at the centre, clarified that immigrants are detained primarily because authorities are not sure of the immigrant's identity, or in cases in which the immigrant poses a “flight risk” or a menace to Canada. However, he would not comment on why the authorities decided to incarcerate Vides, who had declared his identity to the authorities, and, as an employed worker concerned with the continuation of his daughter's schooling, seemed to pose little risk of either flight or danger to the public.

Immigration attorney Jared Will observed in a telephone interview that, “Immigration officers have a great amount of power over people's lives. Yet there’s no accountability process that is comparable to even something police officers have.”

While Will noted that it is possible to file complaints against immigration officers, “In terms of holding them accountable, there’s no process that has any teeth.”

Locked up in the immigrant prison in Laval, Eduardo Vides took matters into his own hands. He began a hunger strike in protest of his family’s treatment.

CBSA put him in his own private “room” (like the term “prisoner,” the word “cell” is avoided in the parlance of the immigrant detention system), isolating him from the general population.

Meanwhile, Jessica Vides was desperately seeking medical treatment for her eldest daughter, who she said had still not recovered from the injuries suffered in the hands of the immigration officer three weeks prior. Upon the advice of a local nonprofit, she brought Eduarda to Montreal’s principal francophone children’s hospital, St. Justine. However, staff there refused to examine the girl upon hearing that her injuries had stemmed from a confrontation with immigration authorities, according to Eduarda’s parents.

The St. Justine ombudsperson failed to respond to a request for comment for this article.

In a telephone interview on December 13, Jessica Vides said that the pain in the seven-year-old's stomach had not improved, and she also had a fever.

When The Dominion called Jessica Vides two days later, the mother-of-three’s number had been disconnected.

On December 15, the day the government had ordered that the family be deported, the Vides’s first grader still had a fever and pain in her stomach, according to her mother. Local solidarity activists had urged her to bring the child to a sympathetic Montreal doctor. But the family’s lawyer, Stephane Dulude, told Jessica Vides to go instead to the airport, as ordered by CBSA. Upon this advice, Jessica arrived at the airport with her three children, and presented herself to the immigration authorities. She appealed on her daughter's behalf for medical attention.

Reached by telephone, CBSA spokesperson Stephane Malepart said that, “we make sure that everybody's in good health to travel. If that person has to go to the hospital before travelling, we'll then we take them to the hospital and that's it.”

However, Jessica Vides told The Dominion that the immigration agent she appealed to responded by asking whether the girl was a Canadian citizen. Vides says she was told, “If not, it doesn’t matter. She has to leave.” The seven-year-old was thus refused treatment again. And then she, her little brother and sister (both Canadian citizens), and their mom, were all immediately deported.

The Vides family’s deportation was executed on day 22 of Eduardo's hunger strike.

Two days later, The Dominion, accompanied by Sarita Ahooja, an organizer with No One Is Illegal and Solidarity Across Borders, visited Eduardo in the Laval detention centre.

An activist with long experience working with immigrants in detention, Ahooja expressed surprise when the CBSA guards led us to a private office-style room equipped with office chairs, a desk, and a computer to wait for Eduardo Vides. (She pointed out the usual meeting room as we exited: a sparse common room with plastic chairs.)

Ahooja commented that she had never seen such measures taken in the Laval detention centre. Eduardo was being kept in isolation “to avoid the possibility that his resolve would spread and inspire others to defy an unjust and repressive system,” she later explained in an email to The Dominion, adding that this was not just her analysis but also Eduardo Vides’s.

When asked about CBSA’s response to the hunger strike, Malepart said the agency takes such actions very “seriously.” In fact, they had even put off Vides’s deportation, originally scheduled for December 15.

But upon hearing about his wife and kids’ deportation, the Salvadoran man broke his hunger strike. He wished to be with his family, even despite the threats on his life in El Salvador, he explained.

Late on the afternoon of the following Friday, CBSA informed him that he would be deported very late that Sunday night—a timing Vides found “suspicious,” given that it left very little time for legal recourse.

In the 2008–2009 fiscal year, the last year for which figures are available on the CBSA’s website, 13,249 people were deported from Canada—an increase of well over 50 per cent since 1999. Of those deported, 9,672 were, like the Vides family, asylum seekers whose claims had been turned down by the Canadian government. And, since last summer’s passage of a new refugee reform bill, this trend seems to be on the rise, as the government shifts ever greater resources into what CBSA euphemistically refers to as “removals.”

Bill C-11, which will go into effect over the next year, is, amongst other things, supposed to eliminate the excessively long delays that families like the Videses have faced in waiting for a final decision on their asylum claims. “It was a fact that many people had been waiting for years” for final decisions on their refugee claims, according to Dench. This problem has been made worse in recent years by the federal Conservatives’ failure to fill dozens of vacancies on the Immigration and Refugee Board.

Moreover, the lack of a refugee appeals process in the current system means that asylum seekers whose claims are rejected are forced to go through a lengthy judicial review by the Federal Court. These delays have serious consequences for asylum seekers, making it very likely that families like the Videses will settle in Canada over the course of the excessive waits they are forced to undergo, and then face undue hardships if their refugee claims are turned down and they are forced to leave the country.

Bill C-11 is supposed to address these problems by shortening the timelines for asylum decisions, and creating a new refugee appeals process that will expedite the processing of asylum seekers whose claims are rejected. According to the Canadian government’s backgrounder on the bill, the new system also entails “hiring more officers to expedite removals.”

Groups like the CCR assess the new legislation as a positive development overall, although they express concerns that the new timelines may not allow sufficient time for all asylum seekers to prepare claims, and they are critical of the way the new system creates a discriminatory two-tier system based on asylum seekers’ country of origin. As well, given that many families like the Videses have already built lives for themselves in Canada due to the excessive delays of the old system, the new emphasis on “removals” raises serious concerns.

Already, there seem to be changes in how immigration authorities are dealing with outstanding deportation orders, according to Will. “There are situations where before they would have waited, and now they’re just plowing ahead as quickly as possible,” the Montreal-based immigration lawyer observed. “There’s definitely been a very obvious hardening in carrying out deportations in situations in which there may have been more leeway in the recent past,” he added.

As the country lurches from the old dysfunctional system in which thousands of asylum seekers spent years waiting for a decision, to a renewed emphasis on deportations, one can only guess how many families will suffer the consequences.

Back in San Salvador, Jessica Vides is worried about how her family will survive. If they pay the money to the gangs, “how will we feed the kids?” she asked, adding that with the threats to their lives, “Eduardo can’t go to work.” The family cannot possibly stay in El Salvador, she said.

More than a month after his family’s deportation, the young father who had defied CBSA with his hunger strike sounded tired, and sad.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do here right now. We’re in a very hard situation,” he said.

The family yearns to return home—to Canada.

Brought to Canada when she was just one year old, it is the only country Eduarda Vida has ever known. “She tells me that she misses her country,” Jessica Vides told The Dominion. The seven-year-old girl’s mom says she corrects her daughter’s “mistake.” For as CBSA has made painfully clear to both of Eduarda’s parents, Canada is not their country.

But for the girl who was abruptly yanked out of her first grade year at Montreal’s Bois Franc-Aquarelle elementary school in December, this is no easy lesson.

“I miss my friends,” the seven-year old told The Dominion mournfully, in a telephone from San Salvador more than a month after her family’s deportation. She also misses the snow, and her school, she said.

“I don’t have school here,” she added, explaining, “we can’t leave the house.”

Isabel Macdonald is a Montreal-based journalist and media scholar who has written for The Nation, The Guardian and The Toronto Star, amongst other publications.

Canada cuts refugees loose

"We Are Tired"

hillarybain — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:30:58 +0000

Fate of Liberian refugees uncertain

There’s an African proverb that reads: “When two elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.” It’s an adage that rings all too clear in Liberia after nearly 15 years of civil war.

While leading a coup d'état in 1980, Samuel Doe murdered and subsequently replaced Liberia's president, William R. Tolbert. Doe reigned for 10 years until the notorious Charles Taylor and his National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) attacked Liberia on Christmas Eve, 1989. Civil war ensued for the next 14 years.

The Buduburam refugee settlement, located an hour outside Ghana's capital, Accra, is home to some 35,000 Liberian refugees, a number that fluctuates daily as refugees constantly come and go. Some of Buduburam's inhabitants have been there for up to 18 years, while others have just arrived, but all have one thing in common: they are seeking asylum.

In the 14 years of war in Liberia, more than 200,000 people were slain, some 800,000 internally displaced, and an estimated 350,000 Liberians fled their country. Liberia's infrastructure, education, health system and economy crumbled.

Liberia has been relatively peaceful since the signing of the August 2003 Peace Agreement in Accra, moving the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) to launch a voluntary repatriation program in October 2004; the program came to a conclusion on June 30 of last year.

Under the UNHCR, registered repatriates were transported from their country of exile to Liberia via ship or air. Once in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, the UNHCR gave each repatriate $5 US and four months' ration of wheat, blankets and basic cooking utensils.

According to the UNHCR, 6,320 Liberian refugees from Ghana and over 110,000 people from other West African countries have passed through the UNHCR's repatriation program. This has still left an estimated 72,000 Liberian refugees in West Africa. Ghana is currently home to one third of those refugees, totalling some 36,000 people.

The UNHCR has been pressuring the Ghanaian government to reintegrate remaining refugees into Ghanaian society where they are currently not allowed to work legally. Starting from February 19, 2008, however, hundreds of Liberian refugee women began protesting the UNHCR’s stance. Protesters are demanding resettlement in a third country-–namely Europe or North America-–or $1000 US for each refugee to travel back home.

“Basically the refugees want an increase package from the UN in order to return to Liberia, or to be resettled in a third country of asylum,” says Leon Toe, 26, a resident of Buduburam and a Liberian journalist. “They want the UNHCR and the governments of Liberia and Ghana to either resettle refugees or take them back to Liberia and give them money. More than five dollars to restart their lives,” says Toe.

Many of the residents insist that five dollars and some grain simply will not be enough to sustain them while rebuilding their homes and lives.

“The camp is really heating up,” says Joseph Keanmue Tokpah, a resident of Buduburam for the past eight years. “The women even sleep on the field where the repatriation is done [in protest].”

“There is tension in the air. There is fear because most people fear that anytime the military can take action,” says Toe.

Ryan Bolton was living and reporting at the Liberian refugee camp from the end of July until September with Journalists for Human Rights.

Shortly before this article was published, the author received an email from colleague Leon Toe, a Liberian journalist living in the camps, who was also interviewed in the article.

"Before dawn Monday morning [Mar. 17] heavily armed police raided the camp and took more than 700 women and children to an unknown camp in the east of Ghana. The police took the women and children in about eight buses.

"I pray that things do not get out of hand, or we will all be dead and the world will only condemn the act.

"We are all now living in fear since the Interior Minister ordered the police to arrest our mothers, sisters, wives, and kids, because we do not know what will happen to us males next."

Liberian Refugee Protests 1

Liberian Refugee Protests 2

Abdelkader Belaouni still in sanctuary...

Stefan Christoff — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 23:58:59 +0000

abdelkader.jpg

By Stefan Christoff
Hour

Algerian refugee Abdelkader Belaouni has spent the past two years in sanctuary at St-Gabriel's Church in Pointe St-Charles. On Jan. 1, 2005, Belaouni took sanctuary in open defiance of a deportation ordered by Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

"I'm not hiding from Immigration Canada, but I want to tell them clearly, I will not be presenting myself for deportation," stated Belaouni in a public statement at the time.

Ever since, Abdelkader Belaouni, with the support of multiple community organizations and social justice groups, has been fighting a very public battle with Immigration Canada. It isn't the only battle he's faced in this lifetime. In 1996 he escaped a violent civil conflict in Algeria, which took an estimated 100,000 civilian lives. As a blind man, Belaouni made the journey to New York City, and while he never gained status there he did carve out an independent life selling telephone cards.

Following Sept. 11, 2001, Belaouni left New York out of the fear of systemic persecution against Arabs and Muslims, including mass deportations, disappearances and the fire-bombings of mosques. Immigration Canada didn't exercise sympathy or compassion in the case, instead issuing a deportation order for Belaouni three years after his arrival in Montreal.

Today, Belaouni remains in sanctuary, never having stepped foot outside St-Gabriel's Church in all the time he's been there. "After two years I remain here without status. It is tiring, it is depressing, I want freedom," he explains. "It is clear that the government is aware of my current suffering and my difficult history in Algeria; they must act now and regularize my status."