Citizenship and Immigration committee  As far as I know, all of the experience of refugee law agrees that we don't have a good system to appoint or to screen or to select board members. Everybody, even the Conservative Party, agrees that we have to improve the system. The difference is, or the problems are, how they b

Citizenship and Immigration committee  What I was trying to say when I presented the case to the committee, and I maybe failed to do that, is that this case is an example of the lack of recourse that a rejected refugee claimant has under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. It's clear in this case that if we ha

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, and the discussion that NGOs and civil society had when we were discussing the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, and the commitment we received from the Minister of Immigration at the time when we were putting together the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act...she w

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The other thing is that we submitted all of the evidence to the embassy after this woman was killed, proving that this family is still at risk. The application for a temporary resident permit was approved by the embassy in Mexico. The family, the only survivors, the mother and th

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Okay. In that case, let me put the example that this case proved that the judicial review, the appeal division, is not there. That's why this case was not detected when there was a mistake in the original decision. When the person came back, I tried to make a claim to send back

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you very much. Thank you, honourable members of the committee, for the invitation. I'm going to submit to the committee a real case that is happening right now. The names of the claimants have been a little bit modified because they are still alive and they or their famil

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Let me say that the duplication is not solved by this agreement. Originally, 10 years ago, when the discussion started, it was to avoid duplication and to ban anyone who made a claim in the United States from coming to Canada and then making another claim here. But the agreement

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In order to have safe third country agreements you need to have a standard for everybody, and the standard has to be respected, implemented, and enforced. In reality, right now each country decides on the definition and the procedure on detention, removals, and everything, and it

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Exactly. The convention is implemented nationally; therefore a totally different standard is set up from one country to another. There's no point of comparison.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  My concern is that the family definition that needs to be expanded in the agreement doesn't reflect the other definition of family that we have in other areas of law, because it is not possible to sponsor a niece or a nephew in a particular way, to bring that person to Canada. We

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

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