Thank you. The United Nations convention dealing with refugees was in fact adopted by the UN a very long time ago, in 1951. Canada signed on to that convention in the 1960s and then embodied the principles that were in the international obligation into our domestic law. I believe that legislation was enacted in the mid-1970s, and it is reflected right through all of the subsequent iterations of the act right up until today. The current legislation is the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. There are many sections that are relevant, but the key one is section 133.
That section very clearly says that when a person is in Canada, regardless of how they got here, and they make a claim for asylum, there is an obligation on the part of Canada to give them a fair hearing to determine whether or not they are in need of Canada's protection. If they are found not to need Canada's protection—in other words, it's not a legitimate claim for asylum and this person is not a refugee—then they become inadmissible to Canada and need to be removed from Canada. The law provides for that.
If they do sustain their claim and convince the Immigration and Refugee Board through due process of law that their claim is legitimate, then under the law, by virtue of section 133, how they entered the country becomes irrelevant and non-actionable. That's expressly in the law, in section 133 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. That is the law as it stands now and as it has stood all through the period since the mid-1970s.