Thank you very much to the committee for the invitation. I'm honoured to share this place with Rainbow Refugee.
My name is Dylan Mazur, and I am the executive director at the Vancouver Association for Survivors of Torture, otherwise known as VAST. For the past 30 years, VAST has been providing trauma-focused psychological counselling for refugees who arrive in British Columbia with psychological trauma as a result of torture, political violence, and other forms of persecution, including that inflicted on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
In the realm of refugee protection, we believe that persecution on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is unique, different from other forms of persecution in the enumerated grounds of the refugee convention, such as nationality and political opinion.
Why is it unique?
First, there is black-letter law in more than one third of countries in this world to criminalize homosexuality or the promotion of homosexuality. For LGBTI communities, this means that their own government has enacted legislation that criminalizes their identity; legislation that criminalizes this most fundamental form of human expression, the expression of gender and sexuality.
Second, persecution on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is unique because it is not reserved for contexts of armed conflict or political violence. It takes place in any and all contexts in which identity is criminalized. These unique circumstances, we believe, require a unique response. First is to deem all LGBTI communities in the contexts in which their identities are criminalized as vulnerable groups and to not use armed conflict or political violence as an indicator of vulnerability, but rather to use the context to determine whether or not their identities are criminalized.