Citizenship and Immigration Committee on July 18th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Good afternoon. I call the meeting to order.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on June 16, 2016, the committee will resume its study on immigration measures for the protection of vulnerable groups.

Appearing on the panel before us this afternoon is the Honourable Yonah Martin, senator and deputy leader of the opposition in the Senate. Welcome.

We have Professor Audrey Macklin from the faculty of law of the University of Toronto via video link. It's good to see you again.

As well, Mr. Martin Mark is here from the Office for Refugees of the Archdiocese of Toronto.

I thank you all for appearing before us, and I remind everyone that your opening statements are to be seven minutes. We will begin with Senator Martin.

[Yonah Martin, Senator, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, As an Individual]

Good afternoon.

Thank you, Chair and members of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, for undertaking this important study on how Canada can best support vulnerable groups in hard-to-access regions and for examining how Canada can accelerate the asylum applications of Yazidi victims of genocide and other vulnerable peoples.

As a member in the other house, I am honoured to have this opportunity to speak to the recent report entitled “The Forgotten Many: Human Rights and North Korean Defectors” that the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights tabled, which highlights the plight of North Korean defectors and their perilous journey to freedom.

The United Nations Human Rights Council's report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea concluded that the violations of human rights constitute crimes against humanity. The gravity, scale, and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world. Living conditions have deteriorated to extreme levels of deprivation in which the rights to food, health, and other essential needs are categorically denied. Any North Koreans who have successfully defected have done so for their survival, and until they have secured refuge in a safe country, their lives and the lives of possibly three generations of family members remain at serious risk if they are caught in China for illegally crossing the border, or in other countries of Southeast Asia, if and when they are repatriated to North Korea.

Despite international pressure on the North Korean regime with the release of the UN commission of inquiry report, North Korea continues to adamantly refuse to co-operate with the UN and other international human rights monitors. This includes denying access for the UNHCR special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the DPRK.

In the Senate report, we carefully examined the issue of North Korean defectors, who are one of the most vulnerable groups of the world and who are in hard-to-reach places for Canadian officials, to offer solutions and recommendations the Government of Canada can seriously consider to help such desperate and vulnerable people. Having reviewed the Hansard of the Yazidi genocide motion debated in the House on June 9 and the June 15, 2016, UN Human Rights Council report entitled “'They Came to Destroy': ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis” confirming the genocide of the Yazidi people, I commend this committee in adopting the order of reference that is the basis of this current study. It is my sincere hope that my testimony about our Senate committee's report and the proposed solutions to help North Korean defectors will in fact be equally useful in helping more Yazidi victims and other vulnerable peoples find refuge in Canada.

The Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights began our study with the personal and compelling testimony of a North Korean defector named Hyeonseo Lee, who witnessed her first public execution at the age of seven and authored the book The Girl With Seven Names: A North Korean Defector's Story. Of particular note from her testimony is that approximately 70% to 80% of the defectors escaping North Korea are women. She stated that women are subjected to horrible abuse along their journey to freedom, which is most often through China. Many female defectors become sex slaves or wives of Chinese men after they are captured, and sadly, some have even been willingly sold as prizes in order to earn money or to help their desperate families at home. Women are treated like merchandise and sold like slaves for as little as $80, depending on their age and appearance.

Our study reported that pregnant women who are repatriated and are unable to prove that their child has a North Korean father may be forced to have abortions. Even more horrific and terrifying were cases we heard of mothers being forced to drown their newborn children in buckets. Children who are brought to North Korea from China are not recognized as citizens of China and are not accepted as citizens in North Korea, resulting in stateless children with no protection, no rights, and no benefits whatsoever.

According to the executive director of the HanVoice support association, Chris Kim, in the early 1990s North Korean refugees had three main escape routes out of China: via the Mongolian border; claiming asylum at foreign diplomatic missions in China; and via routes through Southeast Asia, which typically included Thailand. China has effectively shut down the first two options, leaving southeast Asian countries like Thailand as the only remaining path to freedom.

Currently, in the Southeast Asia region, Thailand is the only country that does not repatriate North Korean defectors back to the DPRK once caught for illegal entry. In Thailand, defectors are held in detention centres and await processing of exit visas from the Thai government to go to South Korea or, after a much longer period, to go to the United States as authorized by the North Korean Human Rights Act, which will be further explained.

We heard during our Senate study that the current North Korean regime has tightened security along the China-DPRK border to avoid further defections of not only DPRK citizens, but also, increasingly, the country's security border guards. We also learned that North Korean defectors, once they escape the DPRK with their lives, are suspended in a legal conundrum. South Korea's constitution identifies all persons living on the Korean Peninsula as South Korean nationals. By the virtue of this fact, there's a perceived durable solution that all North Korean defectors in a Thai detention centre can go to South Korea.

However, in certain circumstances, and with clear reason, there are defectors who fear returning to the very peninsula where they risked everything, including their lives, to escape. Their dread is not a reflection on South Korea's failure to protect defectors or settle them in South Korea but on the close proximity of South Korea to its northern half and the trauma that certain defectors must endure for being so close to the place of their suffering. This legal conundrum puts North Korean defectors in a precarious space, suspended in a category of their own, be it being stateless in China or ineligible to be designated as UN refugees to access the international asylum system.

In 2004 the United States implemented the North Korean Human Rights Act, which recognized the legal gap by providing humanitarian assistance to North Koreans inside North Korea; providing grants to private non-profit organizations to promote human rights, democracy, rule of law, and the development of a market economy in North Korea; increasing the availability of information inside North Korea; and providing humanitarian and legal assistance to North Koreans who have fled North Korea.

After receiving written submissions from the Council for Human Rights in North Korea and the Canadian Federation of North—

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Fifteen seconds, please.

[Yonah Martin]

There are two recommendations from the report that I will be putting forward for consideration. I think the committee will find them very applicable and useful. The report will be submitted, and you can then look at the recommendations cleary and directly.

I will close by saying that Canada's commitment to advancing the cause of human rights is not based only on the international conventions to which we are party; it is because with all the atrocities being systematically committed on human beings all over the world, it is simply the right thing for Canada to do, as we have done before over the course of our nation's history in times of war and peace.

I hope you will be coming to such conclusions in your study today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Senator.

Professor Macklin, you have seven minutes, please.

[Prof. Audrey Macklin, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, As an Individual]

I would like to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak to you today from Windsor.

I support what I understand to be a proposal to restore the source country class, which was eliminated under the previous government. I do not bring to this subject any specific expertise with respect to Yazidis, and I'd like to be very clear on that at the outset.

There are, in my view, two issues with respect to how one might consider restoring a source country class.

One is the perennial challenge, which perhaps played a role in its elimination, of meeting the logistical and political challenges of attempting to resettle people who are still in their country of origin. These are people who meet the definition of a refugee recognized under law, but for the fact that they're not outside their country of origin. It may seem that this distinction shouldn't count for very much, and, in principle, it doesn't—that is to say, we understand them to be people at risk of persecution on a convention ground—but practically and politically, it imposes significant challenges.

Why? It's because while they're in their country of nationality, the government from which they might well fear persecution or the government that is unable to protect them from persecution is still in sovereign control of that territory, so no government, including the Canadian government, can access it and resettle people from there without the consent and co-operation of the government of nationality. The problem is that if it's the government that is engaging in the persecution, it's going to be very difficult. Even if the government isn't, but isn't in full control of its territory, it's still going to be very difficult.

Sometimes the Canadian government relies for resettling refugees on the assistance of the UNHCR and similar organizations that operate in countries of asylum to help them identify and select people for resettlement. That's also not as available in a country-of-origin situation, because UNHCR will likely not be present there. Sometimes they will be with respect to internally displaced peoples, but not necessarily, and presumably the people whom one might be concerned about won't all be internally displaced. Civil society in those countries could identify people who are at risk, but that's a very risky activity for them to be engaged in.

All in all, I think the challenge here is that the principle of identifying a source country class and being able to resettle people from countries of origin is laudable, but it's important for the government not to make promises that it can't keep, to raise the expectation that people will be able to be resettled and then confront the logistical challenges that impede that.

One thought among many is to focus attention in source country classes on private sponsorship of refugees in circumstances where the Government of Canada is otherwise able to operate its immigration system—that is to say, in a country where people are otherwise able to leave, whether for family reunification or as economic immigrants. That would suggest that the government is, in a sense, able to conduct what it needs to do, such as carry out the various kinds of clearances and so on, for immigration purposes, and could do it with people being resettled from that country. Relying on private mechanisms more than government assistance for refugees removes the burden on the government of finding a way to identify refugees in a proactive way in circumstances where the local government may not be receptive and, indeed, may be antagonistic to that enterprise. That's one thought.

A second challenge regarding the source country class concerns the idea of naming particular subgroups, whether by ethnicity, religion, or otherwise, rather than relying simply on the refugee definition as such. I would say that here the history of the development of the international refugee regime has reflected a move away from ad hoc identification of particular groups that will be considered refugees by virtue of naming them as a group and toward developing a generic definition into which any individual might fit. That's what we now have with the definition of “refugee status”: it doesn't name particular groups, but instead names grounds of persecution into which specific groups might fit.

Here I just point out that it's not necessary to name a group by its ethnicity or religion or race or something else in order to include members of that group in the refugee definition for purposes of refugee protection and resettlement; however, if you do proceed by a system of naming specific groups, that approach can have the effect of excluding other people who aren't in that group. Clearly, on the one hand, there's no loss to inclusion by just using the refugee definition, but there is a loss by way of exclusion if you turn to a system that specifically names groups instead.

Subject to any questions you might have, those are my submissions. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Professor Macklin.

Now I'd like to ask Mr. Mark, for seven minutes, please.

[Dr. Martin Mark, Director, Office for Refugees of the Archdiocese of Toronto]

Honourable Chair, vice-chairs, and members of Parliament, my name is Martin Mark. I work for the Roman Catholic Church at the Office for Refugees of the Archdiocese of Toronto. We are one of the 100 SAHs, sponsorship agreement holders.

Last year we initiated to resettle over 2,300 refugees from all over the world, and in March, in an unexpected blitz, we submitted 700 additional files that were sitting in our office from last year. This over-3,000-person resettlement, compared to our allocation by the immigration department for this year—only 1,000—is not really encouraging.

We might be a little different from other members of the SAH association. For example, we conduct regular mission trips to visit refugee camps and communities to identify, select, and screen refugees for resettlement. There is a young man sitting behind me; we met him five years ago in a refugee camp, and thanks to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, he is now a Canadian. This is his first summer here.

This is a different method that we use, and in a week from now, at this time exactly, I will be sitting in a refugee camp in the Middle East, most probably with the Yazidi people.

Thank you for the invitation, and thank you for choosing this forgotten but crucial topic, which is related to the majority of those affected by the worldwide refugee crisis of our day. It has probably never before been discussed at such a high level, so our hopes are up.

Something went wrong, and we have to correct it before it's too late. It is well known internationally how generous Canada is when it comes to humanitarian efforts, especially in helping refugees. In my work, both locally and internationally, I hear a lot of praise and appreciation for what Canada and Canadians have done and continue to do for uprooted people. There are 100,000 people, if not a million people, who have found peace, safety, and unparalleled opportunity for a dignified and prosperous life for themselves and their children because of the Canadian refugee protection system in the past three decades and more.

Besides the inland protection and overseas resettlement, Canada was and is open to refugees who can afford to use other immigration venues and arrive without the label “refugee”. Some economic migrants, business people, and other migrants are also people who were forced to migrate; however, they have had a chance to use other than refugee methods to arrive in the safety of Canada.

First, it is important to leave other immigration venues open so that these refugees who can manage their lives should not be forced to use the limited resettlement spots that we have. As a private sponsor board or, as I prefer to call it, a civic resettlement, we have seen great improvements and a significant increase in the past years. However, we have lost a lot of options and we did not get long-awaited basic improvements.

When we focus on vulnerable groups and individuals in the context of resettlement, the first issue we might want to address is direct access. Direct access was the policy of Canadian embassies for decades. It meant that people living in their own country, once they felt that their situation was dangerous and life-threatening, had the option to approach the Canadian representative to ask for protection. This was also fair in ensuring that people were not waiting for decisions for long years or decades in refugee camps, as people did.

In 2002 the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, IRPA, limited access to a small number of countries, which were actually also the so-called “source countries”. By 2012, with the changes in the regulations, together with the elimination of the source countries, direct access was closed also.

The source country class had a very important role in providing protection. We know it did not function well in several situations. However, to close it means that today Canada excludes a majority of forced migrants. Of the 65 million people of concern to the UN, only 21 million are refugees who are eligible for the Canadian refugee protection system—resettlement or anything else—while the majority of uprooted people are IDP, internally displaced peoples. Thus, we exclude 41 million people in need. Something went wrong, and we have to correct it before it's too late.

Now let's talk about the nature of conflicts that create refugee situations and how to react to them.

In the 20th century, the main causes of conflicts were nationalism, racism, and political power hunger. This dramatically changed in the late 21st century. The power struggle is there as the main motivation in several conflicts; however, in most cases, it is with religious cover.

What we see worldwide now is a series of predominantly religious conflicts. A good example is Somalia. When we started to resettle Somali refugees, we had to help the minority clans—Bajunis, Madhiban, and others—because the biggest threat was based on their origin. They were targeted due to their ethnicity. Now we resettle Somalis because of al Shabaab. It has nothing to do with clans anymore. The only motivation is religious extremism.

In the last century, in the Yugoslavian war, the Serbian militants were fighting against both Christians and other Muslims, such as Croatians and Bosnians, because their motivation had nothing to do with faith: they did ethnic cleansing regardless. We resettled them, both Christians and Muslims. They were targeted and they were victims.

The main issue is to identify why the person is persecuted.

In Iraq, when ISIS members place a symbol on a house, they focus on the person's belief. “Nazarene” means “Christian”, so they target them based on their faith. Persecuting the Yazidis and other minorities is based on their faith, and in this way they become the most vulnerable group, with no significant help and unbelievable abuse and extreme torture.

With One Free World International and Reverend Majed El Shafie and Chantal Desloges' law firm, we worked on a proposal on how to raise awareness for the Yazidis, the most abandoned group in the history of persecution and refugee protection. It is up to you to give the legal framework, but in our project proposal we describe a possibility of a pilot project to help these internally displaced people, who have no political or religious lobby to get help and are somehow forgotten.

With opening up the source country class or with ministerial public policy decisions, civic sponsors could start helping these traumatized communities in desperate need. If you are serious about helping the most vulnerable, if you are serious about ensuring support for the safety of women at risk, as usually we Canadians proudly state, then there is no group in the world right now that is more in need of help than they are.

I would be pleased to discuss this further, but due to the time constraints, let me just briefly mention two issues in closing.

Processing times in several places worldwide are about three to five years. As one of the refugee singers wrote in his song for us, protection delayed means protection denied. We are losing selected and screened refugees to other resettlement countries, even to Australia. This is happening even in the Middle East, where we are very happy to say that Canadian processing is extremely fast. The backlog in the resettlement system in some parts of the world makes Canadian resettlement nearly impossible.

Finally, talking about vulnerable groups, we should not forget the most vulnerable: unaccompanied minors and children. In our resettlement programs, usually unaccompanied children are excluded. This is extremely sad and wrong. If you go to the Yazidis, you find an abused young woman under 18, whom we might not be able to help because of the ban on resettlement. Why don't we follow the U.S., which has an extremely successful program helping minors? We shouldn't just abandon children in the camps.

Thanks, and I wish you great success in this area of work. We can give hope for the most hopeless if we work together.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

Thank you, Mr. Mark.

Now we begin our first round of questioning. Mr. Sarai, you have seven minutes, please.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Mr. Chair, I think it was...I might be mistaken, but...yes? Okay.

[The Chair, Liberal, Borys Wrzesnewskyj]

It was an error here.

It's Mr. Fragiskatos for seven minutes, please.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Thanks, and thank you to all of you for appearing today.

Mr. Mark, I'm interested in the proposal you mentioned. Would you be able to provide the members of the committee with a copy of it?

[Dr. Martin Mark]

Definitely. I think that Reverend Majed El Shafie, who might appear at the committee just two days from today, will bring the copies with him. It's a very detailed plan. We worked on it for years and years, and we think the situation is now.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

I read about it in the press in early June, so I was interested from that time. The sooner the better, because this is such a critical issue.

Here are some questions on how it would work. Your organization and One Free World International would go to Iraq, to Erbil in the north, I take it. For how long would you go?

[Dr. Martin Mark]

The Office for Refugees of the Archdiocese of Toronto has a good record of going to areas where...for instance, you go to a refugee camp, a refugee community, where the UN cannot conduct its work. We have access and we—

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

I'm sorry; I don't mean to cut you off, and you're very kind to come here and testify today, but I only have seven minutes, so I do have to ask the question. How long do you expect...? What will be the duration of this trip to northern Iraq?

[Dr. Martin Mark]

We first have an exploratory trip coming up in the next weeks, and then if we get permission, it looks as if we can select and identify about 400 families within six to eight weeks.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Have you secured the...? Well, before that, let me ask about security. Obviously, northern Iraq is more stable than the rest of Iraq, but it is not terribly stable. What about security issues? Have you done anything to ensure the security issues are taken care of?

[Dr. Martin Mark]

We are extremely cautious about security, because we could definitely be targets. We go every time with the co-operation of our local partners. We have people on the ground who are working there with refugees, so the local refugee-serving organizations tell us which areas and which times are secure enough to process the....

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

You think that there's no issue with security.

[Dr. Martin Mark]

What I think is very important is that we have up-to-date information on when and where it's secure to go.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Have you been given approval by the KRG, the Kurdistan Regional Government? Have you spoken to Mr. Barzani's people? Obviously the north of Iraq is quite autonomous. Some would even say it is a de facto state. Have you received permission from the leadership there to do this?

[Dr. Martin Mark]

Yes, definitely, and I think everything is going as is needed.

Reverend Majed's—

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Let me just ask whether definite permission has been given on the part of the KRG.

[Dr. Martin Mark]

I didn't see the permission, but Reverend Majed is the leader of the delegation. He will be—