Citizenship and Immigration Committee on May 31st, 2006

[Joel Chipkar]

There is no one here today from Amnesty International.

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Okay.

The question I have is, how many Chinese nationals are currently making refugee claims here in Canada on the basis of the allegations you've made of persecution for reasons of membership in Falun Gong?

[Joel Chipkar]

I think that's a really good point because it gives credibility to our organization.

I've done a lot of presentations. I actually did two presentations last year to Immigration and Refugee Board members in Toronto; I've been on probably 40 cases as an expert witness, and we have been successful with all of those.

I have been told by refugee board members that thousands of Falun Gong claimants come in to try to gain refugee status. Last year the Falun Dafa Association had a maximum of 40 cases.

Our mandate is not to actively seek those who we feel are true or false claimants, but to actively protect those who we feel are true Falun Gong practitioners who come to us for support.

The IRB has repeatedly accepted the Falun Dafa Association's testimony as credible and as an expert witness. We are the only organization that again, as I said, is within the Falun Gong community on a daily basis.

I myself have been approached by lawyers asking me to come to help them with refugee cases, and I say no. Mr. Joel Laten, my lawyer, whom we use in Toronto and whom we trust very much as a very good supporter for Falun Gong practitioners, told me he could make over $150,000 a year just by Falun Gong claims if he wanted to.

It's a huge business, and we don't want to get involved. We sent a letter to the IRB asking for another hearing because we have heard other organizations are charging money for letters to claimants, saying, "We will give you a letter saying you're a Falun Gong practitioner, but you have to give us $300." As soon as we heard that, we wanted to stop that. This is not what this is about, so we wanted to make sure the IRB understands the Falun Dafa Association is the only authorized organization with the expertise to verify true practitioners.

[David Matas]

I should say I've got the board's statistics on my hard drive here, and it says that for 2005, there were 1,743 claims from China--all claims from China--decided in the calendar year, and 1,879 are still pending at the end of the calendar year.

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

And how many of those pending claims relate to persecution for beliefs in Falun Gong?

[David Matas]

The board doesn't break out the statistics that way. It's just by country.

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Would your organization know? How many people are you working with on the backlog?

[Joel Chipkar]

Members have told me it's about 80%.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Mr. Li, you wanted to make a comment to Mr. Wilson?

[Xun (Shawn) Li]

Yes, I'll give you more concrete information. To the best of my knowledge, the Falun Dafa Association has seen 75 people obtain refugee status in the past seven years. About 70 people are applying now. So the total is under 150 in the past seven years.

I have the geographical distribution of the individuals; if you need that information I can talk to you separately.

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

I have one other question. Do I have time?

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Go ahead.

[Blair Wilson, Liberal, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Does the IRB require any further information to allow it to expedite the briefings of these cases more quickly? Is there something the committee can provide to the IRB so they will have more information to go on?

[Joel Chipkar]

If the committee could accept that the Falun Dafa Association is an authority on who are true practitioners, it would probably help expedite the cases we're involved with. Again, our mandate is not to get involved with all cases, but only the ones who come to us looking for support, who we feel are genuine practitioners.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Okay, thank you.

Madame Deschamps.

[Johanne Deschamps, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

First off, I'd like to thank the witnesses, specifically the three individuals who have agreed to testify today before the committee. I am profoundly touched by and extremely sympathetic to your cause.

I also want to let you know what our party's foreign affairs critic, Ms. Lalonde, is doing. Last April, she forwarded a letter to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Peter MacKay, informing him that the Falun Dafa Association had contacted parliamentarians to relate to them the persecution they were experiencing at the hands of the government and to tell them about certain ongoing practices, specifically the practice of removing and selling vital organs and human tissue.

In my view, it's important for the committee to hear about some of these horror stories.

The letter also talks about the existence of 36 concentration camps in China which may house up to 120,000 people. It informs the minister that the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture announced last March that he would be conducting an investigation.The association calls on the minister to press for this international investigation as soon as possible in order to shed light on this situation and as well, to give his utmost consideration to this letter.

We've also been told of cases where persons applying for refugee status who claim to have been persecuted have had their applications denied. Had the refugee appeal section been operational, it likely would have allowed these individuals to state their case, contrary to what we are now seeing.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you. We have about five minutes left, so I think I'll give a question to Bill and a question back to Borys, and then we'll wrap up, if you've finished, Madame Deschamps. You did have a couple of minutes left, if you wanted.

[Johanne Deschamps, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

No. I don't think that words can begin to describe everything these people have endured.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you.

Bill, for a last question, and then Borys, for one last question.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Mr. Matas, one of the things you mentioned was source country class and that Falun Gong practitioners should be recognized as a persecuted group within China, and Canada should allocate specific numbers of government-assisted refugee visas to assist those people. Can you explain a bit more how that works?

I think a lot of us are more familiar with people who have actually fled their country as refugees and then get the assistance of Canada in that situation, and we may have seen some of the problems of folks who are internally displaced refugees and the difficulties of assisting them. So I would assume that there are similar problems with assisting practitioners who are still in China and are experiencing persecution. I wonder if you can talk a bit about how that might work and what kinds of numbers the association has in mind.

[David Matas]

The way the regulations work is that normally you have to be outside your country to get refugee protection under the refugee definition and other Canadian laws. Canada has an exception for a few countries, six of them, and I see that the six are Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, the DRC--that's Congo--Zaire, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. If you're in those six countries, and only in those six countries, you can get protection while you're still in those countries and come to Canada as a protected person.

We're saying to add China. Make China number seven, so that somebody can come to a Canadian visa post within China and say, “I am at risk”, and the person can come directly from China to Canada as a person at risk without having to go through a third country. That's the proposal.

When it comes to the government-assisted refugee program, the way it works is that it's very finely broken up. Canada accepts 7,300 or 7,500, but they do it not just as a gross number. They do it by visa posts, and it's all finely broken down. So there are allocated numbers for government-assisted in third countries. And we say that since they're breaking it down and they're doing it by visa post, they should allocate a certain number to Falun Gong who have family ties in Canada and who are not durably resettled in a third country, whatever those numbers happen to be.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Thank you, Bill.

Borys, you will have the last question.

[Borys Wrzesnewskyj, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Thank you.

I'd like to return to the issue you raised, Mr. Matas, about hate crimes legislation. It's extremely worrisome that you have state-exported incitement to hatred from China. There are diplomats, in fact—it's documented—who have participated in incitement to hatred. There's also the situation of satellite television potentially being used as a method for incitement to hatred.

This is why I turn to you for your expertise. The legislation refers to various forms of hatred, including religion. Would Falun Gong fit the legal description in the hate crimes legislation, and if it doesn't, are there any suggestions you would want to make in terms of amendments to the existing legislation to capture this particular category?

[David Matas]

In my view, it would fit. This is a belief. It's a spiritual belief. In my view, it would be captured by the existing legislation, and it wouldn't be necessary to amend the legislation.

Actually, now that I think about it, Joel Chipkar himself was involved in this issue, because he was engaged in a libel suit against a member of the Chinese consulate in Toronto; he won that libel suit by default, and the fellow has since left. The libel laws are one way of getting at it, but of course with the libel laws you get damages.

These people simply should not be in Canada. When you're dealing with the diplomatic corps, Canada can just say we don't want you. It's as simple as that. They don't even have to give a reason. They don't have to say it's a violation of the law. They don't even have to establish in criminal court that a crime has been committed.

We're not suggesting here that these diplomats and consular officials should be prosecuted, although that's obviously an option. We're suggesting, simply, that they be expelled. Once they're doing this stuff, whether or not there is a legal opinion that fits four-square within the laws of hate incitement, it's so offensive that it is certainly grounds for expulsion.

[The Chair, Conservative, Norman Doyle]

Yes.