Right. Okay.
My name is Bill Frelick. I'm the program director for refugees at Human Rights Watch. We are an international non-governmental organization, a completely private organization that takes no government funding. We don't represent clients in court. We are independent human rights monitors, not service providers.
My background is that I've been the director of our refugee program for the last six years. Prior to that, I was the director of Amnesty International's refugee program. Prior to that, I was the director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, where I edited World Refugee Survey from 1986 to 2002.
I'm going to address the questions of children and the Australia model, and briefly touch on designated countries of origin. Jennifer Egsgard, a private attorney and a member of our Canada committee, will talk about the detention provisions in permanent residency.
Moving to the question of children, the Convention on the Rights of the Child defines children under the convention as “every human being below the age of eighteen years”. Bill C-31, with respect to the detention provisions, says that “designated foreign national” applies to people “16 years of age or older on the day of the arrival”.
There is no rationale given in the bill or in the commentary on the bill from the government about why 16- and 17-year-old children, defined as children in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, are included here.
The reason we're particularly concerned about this is that article 37 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child basically says that there should be no arbitrary detention of children, and that if children are to be detained, it should be “as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time”.
Our view is that in Bill C-31, the detention of children is really a first choice rather than a last resort. Instead of it being for the shortest period of time, it in fact is mandated to be for a year, with some few exceptions that in practical terms don't look as though they would occur.
We also believe that this detention is arbitrary, which is barred under article 37(d) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, because of the lack of a right to challenge the detention before a court or other independent, impartial authority, notwithstanding the limited Federal Court review that's in Bill C-31.
I think the main thing to keep in mind when looking at the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and in fact looking at the human rights of children, is article 3 of that convention, which says, “In all actions concerning children...the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.”
I think you really need to ask yourself, when you look at the purposes of Bill C-31 with respect to children, whether this is being done in the best interests of the child. If you look at the literature on the impact of detention on children in particular.... We cite in our written testimony studies by the college of general practitioners of the mental health impact on children, which is quite severe.
Perhaps I can take this segue to talk about Australia. The parliamentary commission there, just in March of 2012, issued a massive study on the impact of detention policies there, and cited study after study of the negative impact on particularly children.
So the question arises whether Australia and their treatment of migrants should be a model for Canada. The answer is no. In fact, Australia is not even a model for Australia. The mandatory detention, which went into effect in 1999, by November of 2011 had pretty much been lifted, with bridging visas to bring people from the excised offshore detention facilities.
It was shown that the number of people who had been arriving irregularly by boat in 1999, at time of that legislation, was 1,000. Two years later, when it was in full force in 2001, there were more than 5,000 arrivals.