I'd like to begin by thanking the committee for the opportunity to speak with you today. My organization, the Migration Policy Institute, is an independent, non-partisan research institute dedicated to the better understanding and management of human migration in all of its forms.
Over the last five years, a substantial portion of our work has been focused on better understanding the challenges facing national asylum systems, including those in Europe and the United States, and assessing how these challenges can be effectively addressed. My presentation will draw on the comparative insights that we have gleaned through this work. I should mention that I intend to focus my comments primarily around the operational effects of the amendments that are being considered by the committee and will leave questions of rights and international law to some of the other panellists, who are well suited to address those questions.
Broadly, the aim of the amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act before the committee speak to the heart of the challenges confronting national asylum systems globally: namely, how to maintain a fair and efficient asylum procedure that upholds the standards of international protection in the face of migration flows that are increasingly mixed.
These two goals—fairness and efficiency—are equally important and in some ways interlinked. Backlogs that delay asylum procedures for years are harmful to refugees and leave them in a painful state of limbo, but delays and backlogs can also undermine confidence in the fairness of the system by inviting applications that are not well founded and by making it more difficult to return those who are not in need of protection.
Yet asylum systems in many countries have struggled to maintain efficiency, particularly when application numbers rise. Canada, of course, has not been immune from these difficulties. For this reason, improving the functioning and efficiency of national asylum systems has become a priority globally.
One of the tools that governments have turned to is procedures that limit the admissibility of asylum applications from individuals who previously had the opportunity to receive protection in another country. This is the approach taken by the first amendment under consideration by this committee and where I'll focus.
For asylum agencies, the appeal of rules that restrict the admissibility of applications from individuals who transit certain countries lies in two assumptions: first, that handling cases in this way will be faster than conducting a full asylum procedure and thus will reduce the pressure on asylum systems overall, and, second, that reducing access to asylum procedures for applicants who have transited through safe countries would deter additional applicants entering from these countries in the future.
While these are valid operational goals, international experience suggests that implementing these sorts of arrangements can in fact be difficult in practice and can at times introduce unintended consequences and complexities into the asylum system. Here, it may be helpful to draw on the experiences of the European Union, which has experimented extensively with policies that limit access to asylum for applicants who have transited through other third countries or have made asylum applications there.
Our analysis has highlighted three questions from Europe regarding the effectiveness of these sorts of rules that may be relevant for Canada to consider.
First, can rules such as those proposed by the first amendment under consideration here be enforced? In order to deter new applications, the amendment before the committee would need to be credibly enforced. This means that potential applicants in countries who may be considering coming to Canada would need to know about the rule. Those who are deemed inadmissible under this rule would need to be processed quickly and actually be subject to removal.
Europe's experiences suggest that this may in fact be very difficult to do. There are two examples that are relevant here. One is the agreement that was reached between the EU and Turkey back in 2016 to return applicants who had come from Turkey to Greece and were thus deemed inadmissible. In fact, very few asylum applicants have actually been removed to Turkey from Greece under this agreement, in part because many of the admissibility decisions under the agreement have ultimately been caught up in appeals.
The second example that's relevant is Europe's Dublin regulation, which determines that asylum applicants who have previously applied in another EU country would not be eligible to then apply in a different EU country later on. Similar to the EU-Turkey agreement, very few applicants have actually been transferred between EU countries under the Dublin agreement, often due to administrative difficulties or poor co-operation between EU states.
In both cases, asylum seekers have continued to go to their preferred country of asylum, encouraged by low enforcement rates.
Second, it's worth asking whether applications processed under these rules will actually be faster and more efficient. Again, Europe's experience suggests that they may not be. Instead, opting to channel asylum applications through admissibility procedures has tended to shift backlogs from one part of the process to another. Under the EU-Turkey agreement, for example, the fact that applicants' cases were never heard on their merits left these admissibility decisions particularly vulnerable to appeal. Thousands of cases have actually been taken forward to the Greek courts, challenging the admissibility decisions. As a result, the appeals system has become backlogged, the resources of the courts have been tied up and the issuing of final decisions on these cases has been delayed.
Third and finally, the committee may wish to ask what incentives these sorts of rules may create for asylum applicants and what the effects of those incentives might be. The application of this amendment would be based on biographical and biometric data collected by Canada's international partners. Similarly in Europe, the Dublin system also relies heavily on data-sharing on asylum applicants between EU countries.
How this data is collected and used has led to some perverse and unintended outcomes. First, applicants have had a strong incentive to avoid applying for asylum and generally to avoid detection in the first country in which they arrived, which has created a market for smuggling networks to extend their services into Europe itself. Second, the Dublin rules have encouraged applicants who fear they will be ineligible for asylum to lose or destroy their documentation, or even to attempt to damage their fingerprints, when they arrive in their country of destination. This makes conducting identity and security checks more difficult, with broader implications for the integrity of the asylum system as a whole.
To conclude, while of course it's not possible to always fully transfer policy lessons across national borders, Europe's experience suggests that measures such as those proposed under the amendment may have limited value in terms of increasing the efficiency of the asylum system itself, and ultimately may simply shift the problem to another set of procedures and create new delays and backlogs.
My thanks to the committee. I'll be happy to take questions.