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 families back in Mexico could be at risk of their lives. If the committee wants to have the real names and everything, I have them here with me and can produce them for you.
Nohemi and her daughter Bebe came to Canada in August 2004. They were fleeing threats to their lives by Colombian narcotraffickers who were linked to an infamous gang called the La Familia Michoacana. The father of this girl—the husband of this woman—was killed in 2002. Due to financial constraints, the oldest daughter couldn't come with them, but she joined them later on. That happened in August 2004. In October 2005, the refugee protection division of the Immigration and Refugee Board denied the applicants their refugee claim. The reasons are very interesting because they said they don't have a subjective fear of persecution. One of the reasons they gave in the decision is that there is no credible claim because the oldest daughter, who came late, came with a return ticket to Mexico. When they were interviewed—she was interviewed at the airport—she didn't mention that she wanted to make a claim; she mentioned that she was going to visit Canada. They went to the IRB, and on the basis of that, the IRB member decided that this case is not credible. There is no appeal division, so nobody can correct the findings of the IRB member because it's not an appeal on the merits of the case.
The applicant then applied for judicial review, but of course you know that because the judicial review doesn't go on the merits of the case before the Federal Court, it's meaningless to detect these kinds of problems. The applicant then applied for pre-removal risk assessment. In contradiction to the IRB, the PRA officer believed them. They said, no, I believe this happened to you. They do that because, technically, if the PRA officer decides there is credibility, he would have to call for an interview. In order to avoid interviews, in most of the PRA decisions they accept the claim, they say there's credibility, but they use technical reasons to basically reject the claim. In this case, even though there was plenty of proof that they had gone to the police and everything, the PRA officer decided there was enough protection in Mexico, and they declined the petition as well.
So the applicants were ordered to leave Canada in December 2006. However, they didn't leave because they were so scared to go back. In March 2008 the oldest daughter had to go back. Why? Because the grandma, the mother's mother, was sick, and she went to take care of the grandma. Grandma died five days after she arrived in Mexico. Since that moment, the oldest girl, who at that time was 22, tried to start coming back to Canada. But nobody informed them that there is a procedure for Immigration Canada where they have to present themselves and inform them they are leaving in order to have a record here. She left, and when she tried to come back she was not allowed to make a claim, even for PRA or anything, because the officer at the airport basically sent her back and said they didn't have a record that she was out of the country. She was sent back.
We don't have a mechanism to check at the airport how the officers act. We don't have a mechanism. We don't have an independent ombudsman who you can call to check up on procedures.
On the other hand, there is a procedure at the embassies where they can introduce evidence that a person has left the country undetected and gone back to their country on a certain day. But if you go to any embassy, they refuse to do that kind of procedure, and they have even said that there is no procedure like that. We have had to e-mail the copy of the procedure to the staff at the embassies to try to convince them to recognize that they can do that for a person outside of Canada. The embassies have the obligation to do that according to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, but they have ignored that obligation.
So what happened is she was then forced to leave Canada. She tried again a few weeks later because she was at risk. When she returned to Mexico she was attacked, raped, beaten, and threatened by the same people that they mentioned in the immigration and refugee protection division case. They are still insisting that they have a risk. After that rape she became pregnant and she tried to escape again. At that time the mother managed to contact my office--the mother was still here illegally--and we tried to stop the imminent removal of that young woman, but we couldn't. We went to the Federal Court and the Federal Court declined. They said there was not enough evidence that this woman was going to face a risk back home, and she was sent back. That happened in December 2008.
In February 2009 the mother and the youngest daughter of this woman were also removed from Canada. They met and started living together. In March the young pregnant woman had a medical condition and they went to visit a doctor. She was then kidnapped by the same people that they had been arguing about right from the beginning. She was kidnapped in front of her mother and her sister and a friend who was helping them. She ended up dead in June 2009. She was pregnant. The death certificate of this woman basically showed that she had had a caesarean, and this case--