Mr. Chair, members of the committee, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for inviting me and my colleagues to speak and give our perspective about resettling the Yazidi community members in Canada.
I will keep my remarks very brief, as my time was cut down to 10%. I will talk about some difficulties and challenges of Yazda as an organization participating in the process of submitting applications to the Canadian government during the resettlement project over at least the past eight months. I will talk to you briefly about some of our challenges since we established our organization in late 2014.
We created a database of Yazidi women, female children, and any other survivors traced back to their community who'd been victimized by ISIS and the violence in Iraq. We had all the data already available for those applications. We had qualified those members of the Yazidi community, especially female children and women, who'd been victimized. We submitted their applications. But we faced a challenge that made it very difficult for the Yazda organization. The bar was raised for us to submit those applications. We found that some of the difficulties increased with regard to submitting applications for the families admitted to Canada. One of them was that UNHCR was dealing with multiple random individuals and organizations. As a result, the applications were duplicated. Many cases were rejected and denied, because two copies of the applications would be submitted to UNHCR by two different individuals or organizations. Families had to bear the responsibility of not being accepted as refugees when it was through no fault of their own.
They raised the bar recently for those applications—for example, requiring that families must have very recently survived or very recently escaped from ISIS. Hundreds if not thousands of applications have been submitted to our database. Going back to January of 2015, we still receive, every single day, applications from people who have recently survived. That's one of the other difficulties we have. Being very selective, and requiring that for individuals and families who were recently released, is a very difficult thing for us to do.
As well, multiple organizations have been dealt with differently. Some of the requirements for Yazda have been different from those of other organizations. Yazda submitted multiple applications for cases that according to our database were qualified in terms of the Iraqi government and for any organization helping families go to Australia, Germany, or Canada. According to our standards, those families were qualified, but some of the families were rejected. They complained that—