I want to suggest an analogy that's appropriate to the designated country list. Imagine a neighbourhood where there's a lot of crime, where studies have been done that show that 95% of everyone from this neighbourhood who is charged with a criminal offence is convicted. So the government decides to address this issue, and it brings in a law that says that people from this neighbourhood who are convicted of a crime won't have an appeal. They'll have their trial, they'll have their day in court, but if they lose, there's no appeal. That will reduce crime, it will discourage people from that neighbourhood from committing crimes, and it will unclog the appeal courts, because these people will no longer have an appeal.
On the surface it sounds pretty good, but I would suspect that no one on this committee would ever vote in favour of a bill like that. Why? Because it's discriminatory. Because it's unfair. Because it treats people differently based not on what they've done, but on where they come from.
We all know that under that system, even if 99 out of 100 people from that neighbourhood are going to be found guilty, one day an innocent person is going to come before the court and be found guilty, will go to jail, won't have an appeal, and an injustice will have been done. For that reason alone, I would suggest that kind of law is unjust.
Bill C-11 follows the very same logic, yet we are seriously considering passing this into law. Bill C-11 creates a two-tiered system for refugees, those who come from the countries with the good reputation and those who come from the countries with the bad reputation, and they are not treated the same. They are not treated differently because of what they did, they're treated differently because of the national country of origin--where they come from.
Of course, they still get a judicial review, but I would suggest that if a judicial review were an appropriate remedy, this government would not be proposing implementing the refugee appeal division for most claimants.
Amnesty International is in the business of monitoring and reporting on human rights abuses. Every year, people would like us to come up with a top 10 list of worst countries. I think if we did that, we'd be very popular and we'd probably raise a lot more money than we do now, but we don't do that. In our brief, we set out a number of good reasons why to do so is simply an unreliable method of determining which country is safe and which country is not safe. To do so would be irresponsible and unreliable.
Amnesty International is all for improving our refugee determination system.
Like all of the NGOs who are appearing before you today, we would happily work together with this committee and with this government to make that happen. But we are not all for making things worse.
We strongly urge this committee to take a deep breath, to consider the implications of this bill, and to reject what is unfair, discriminatory, and ill-considered. Take as much time as it takes to get it right.