Citizenship and Immigration committee  Good morning, and thank you very much for the invitation. It's always a pleasure to be in front of the standing committee, and particularly so on this issue. I am going to avoid talking about theories or technicalities. We are front-line workers who work with refugees every day

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, but it is the borderline of the agreement.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. And the question—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, no, what I was reading here are the answers to the questions that we receive. When you say to people, “You don't meet the definition”, and you explain, “This is the agreement. This is— ” Do you know what I mean? The people, depending on their situation, start telling us.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Before the agreement, we had a very organized system whereby the person went and made a claim at the border. Everybody went to identify to the Canadian authorities. You had a procedure. The process went to the Immigration and Refugee Board, the person was determined to be a refug

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I am glad to say that the direct-backs have stopped. Basically the authorities now make efforts to try to accommodate the person who shows up at the border and don't send the person back, for the reasons you just mentioned. We have always had some problems with that situation bec

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We are dealing with a Colombian case in which two brothers are making refugee claims here in Canada, and their mother is still in the hands of the guerillas in Colombia. They are forced even here to send money back to keep their mother alive in Colombia. The whole core of the cas

Citizenship and Immigration committee  She's very respectful of Canada and she doesn't want to be seen as making a comment about our policies, but if you talk to her at another level, you will see the—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That was the whole goal of the refugee convention of 1951. The whole goal was to set up a framework that every country would respect and implement.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It doesn't work.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, it is time to implement the convention. The convention is not implemented for every single country because it's interpreted in a particular way, and the definition of refugees is applied according to national standards. The problem is that the convention also has an article t

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Feel free. Try. We have been trained as NGOs to try to have these mechanisms, to try to have standards. The UNHCR has been trying to set up standards for everybody--lines of interpretation and different things. National realities create different definitions. For instance, the

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I want to clarify that in Canada there is no appeal for refugees. The law has it, but it hasn't been implemented yet. I just want to clarify that. You may talk about different programs to which a person may apply under different criteria, but the appeal hasn't been implemented