I would like to thank you for giving us the opportunity to present our concerns on this bill, and particularly to thank Mr. St-Cyr who sent our request to appear to the committee.
Action Réfugiés was founded in 1994 by the Anglican and Presbyterian churches in Montreal. Our mandate since then has been to assist refugee claimants who are being detained in the Canada Border Services Agency detention centre in Laval. We also match women refugee claimants with volunteers at the beginning of their time in Montreal. And our third program is sponsoring refugees from overseas.
We believe that one of our strengths is that we work with both inland refugee claimants and refugees who are overseas. This is a somewhat unique situation in Canada.
Twenty-two years ago, I started working with refugee claimants who were being detained. As the founding director of this organization, we chose to make the detention program a priority, which you'll hear more about soon.
In 2007, I participated in a very short-term deployment program with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Syria, interviewing Iraqi refugees. Having listened to the stories of more than 350 Iraqi refugees in four months, I really don't have words to describe the enormous suffering and violence that was unleashed in Iraq. Therefore, we welcomed the minister's announcement of the increase in overall resettlement numbers, which I know is not part of this bill. However, it is extremely unfair to make the increased numbers conditional on the passing of this bill. Suggesting that one group merits Canada's protection while the other group is bogus—in other words, pitting inland claimants against refugees overseas—is a strategy unworthy of Canada's humanitarian tradition.
I want to give you a real-life example. A young Iraqi man whom we met—I will call him Yousuf—was kidnapped in Baghdad. A large ransom was demanded and paid by his father. Yousuf had been tortured, and his family sent him to Syria upon his release, but even there he did not feel safe from his captors. Then Yousuf's father was kidnapped and a ransom of $200,000 was demanded; it was paid, and his body was returned. He was killed by the terrorists.
That man's brother is a Canadian citizen, who was deeply disturbed by his own brother's violent death and by the trauma of his nephew, Yousuf. So he assisted Yousuf to travel to Canada. Action Réfugiés met him while he was detained in the Canada Border Services Agency detention centre, having claimed refugee status right at the airport. Yousuf would unquestionably have fallen under the UNHCR referral categories, but was terrified to stay in the region, so he came to Canada. His story illustrates why we must not even imply that refugee claimants are less deserving than those who are refugees overseas.
The designated safe countries of origin emphasizes this idea that some refugees are more deserving than others. The provision is discriminatory and fails to recognize that most countries can be unsafe for some of its citizens at some point—gender claims and victims of sexual orientation are obvious examples.
The fact that refused claims from countries designated as safe will be denied access to the refugee appeal is really worrisome. Refugee claims are by definition based on individual risks of persecution, so safe country designation is a contradictory principle. It seems likely that designating countries as safe will result in increased requests for judicial review for claimants of these countries should they be denied. The Federal Court is likely to grant the review for people who have at least had an appeal at the RAD.
We understand concerns regarding demonstrably weak refugee claims, so why not allow the CBSA to designate a certain number of claims for priority processing at the IRB? This fits much better with the principle of refugee status determination, which is an individualized status.
I will now give the floor to my colleague, Maude Côté.