Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm extremely concerned about safe countries of origin because we don't know who is going to be making that decision and what criteria they're going to make it on.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Not only that, it's totally contrary to the whole principle of the United Nations convention on the protection of refugees. It's supposed to be an individual determination based on the individual's experience. People from very developed countries have even had experiences that wo

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I do not think it's practical. I don't think it's going to help or speed up the system because it's certainly going to be challenged. It really is going to politicize the refugee process to a terrible extent. I can't imagine why any government would want to get into making those

Citizenship and Immigration committee  A claim as a refugee or a claim on a humanitarian basis? On a humanitarian basis, supposedly there's not going to be a safe country that you can't make a humanitarian claim on. Humanitarian claims are based on all kinds of other issues that do not have anything to do with—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  If they made a refugee claim, they would be turned down, yes, if they were from a supposedly safe country, and they would not have access to the humanitarian procedure.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's the way it is now.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would not say that at all. I don't know what the safe countries are going to be, for one thing. No one does. I know, for example, that if Mexico was put on the list, there would be many people who should be granted refugee status from that country because of the current human r

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, 90% of the refused refugees that our clinic has dealt with over the past 13 years that I've been staff lawyer have been successful, and that's—

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, there are not a lot of them—and that's actually another chart I'd like to hold up. We're not talking huge numbers here. If you look at the numbers of humanitarian cases—these are the last facts and figures. Do you see this little tiny green pie here, the smallest one?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Sure. It's in our written materials. In 2008, 4.3% were accepted on humanitarian grounds in all of our big immigration programs. So it's a tiny number.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That's right.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Sure. I'll tell you one. One case we had was of a Roma woman from Hungary, and the board found she was completely truthful. She'd had a terrible life experience of being beaten up repeatedly by skinheads. She'd gone to the police. She had never been protected, and eventually she

Citizenship and Immigration committee  She was accepted on humanitarian grounds. She's now landed.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Really, it's just because it's not a black and white issue if you're a refugee. The suggestion is that if you lose your refugee claim, then you're somehow a cheater, or you're lying, or you're bogus. That is not the case. In fact, a lot of people who lose refugee claims have very

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I agree. I think there will be charter challenges coming out of our ears.