Just to clarify my qualifications for the committee, I am an immigration and refugee lawyer with almost 14 years of experience. I'm certified as a specialist by the Law Society of Upper Canada in both immigration law and refugee law as well. For the past eight years, I have done a great many overseas refugee sponsorships. So I have a lot of experience in the area of regulatory framework that you've been looking at since your last session.
I understand that what you've been looking at is the issue of sexual minorities in Uganda. I have had the benefit of reading the transcript of the witnesses that you had at the prior sitting, so I understand that the issue is in regard to logistical problems that they're having in seeking refuge in other countries, and particularly Canada, and that's why you called me here today. I can indeed identify the procedures for you, identify some areas of concern, and give you some recommendations.
In order to know what you can or cannot recommend, of course, you have to understand a little bit about the statutory and regulatory framework, and that's where I'm taking you now.
First of all, there are two ways someone can claim refugee status in Canada. You can apply if you're inside the country--you can make a claim inland--or, if you're outside Canada, you can make an application as a convention refugee abroad.
In order to make a claim inside Canada, obviously you have to make it to Canada in order to lodge your claim. However, as your previous witness testified, and I agree, the system is set up so that the very temporary visa that would allow a refugee to come to Canada and make that claim is not issued to people who actually intend to make refugee claims in the first place.
Temporary visas are intended for tourists. They're not meant for people who are coming here permanently. They're meant for people who are going to come and visit and then go back. The only way to get such a visa, if you were a refugee claimant, would be, frankly, to lie about it, which some people do. International law actually precludes countries from punishing refugees from doing that if it's the only way to save their lives.
Basically, it's a catch-22 from the very beginning. We'll process your refugee claim if you manage to make it here, but then again, we're going to do everything in our power to make sure you don't make it here in the first place. That leaves people, of course, at the mercy of human smugglers, and then we get all riled up when people find illegal means of entering the country, such as the scene you saw recently in Vancouver with the Tamil boat people.
That's why, in my submission, it's kind of ridiculous to call these people queue jumpers, because there is no actual legitimate way that they can apply to come here as a refugee, except in very narrow circumstances, which I'm about to get into.
The overseas refugee program, the way it's set up, states that individuals can come as refugees from abroad only if they're already outside their country of nationality where they're being persecuted. People who are inside their country of nationality, even if they're under dire threat of death or persecution, cannot meet the definition of refugee. It's inherent that you have to be outside your country of origin. So if you're inside your country, you're out of luck, basically.
There's also a category called the source country class, where if your country is on this certain list of countries, you can actually apply for refugee status while you're still living inside your own country without having to leave. However, the problem is that the list is extremely limited. It's somewhat out of date. Right now, there are really only six countries on this list. They include: Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Congo, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. El Salvador and Guatemala--those are obviously out of date. They're not having the upheavals they used to. Rather incredibly, countries like Afghanistan or Iraq, for example, where we know there are serious human rights violations, are not on this list.
Even if the refugees are actually living outside their country, so they meet the aspect of the definition, they can only apply under three very narrow circumstances. Number one is if you're sponsored to Canada by a sponsorship agreement holder, so that would be a church or other organization that has an agreement with the minister to allow you to sponsor refugees, or you could also be sponsored by a group of five concerned Canadians who are willing to support you financially for a year after you arrive. That program is called the private sponsorship of refugees program, or PSR.
The second way would be if that person is referred to the Canadian government through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Canadian government agrees to accept that person for resettlement to Canada. That process is called government-assisted refugee; we also call them GAR, for short.
The third way is that you have a refugee who is financially wealthy enough to be able to support themselves after they come to Canada without any recourse to any help. That could be a self-supporting refugee. I've never actually done one of those before, but it does exist as a statutory category.
As you can imagine, the statutory regime, the way it stands, severely limits legitimate refugees from even applying to come to Canada as refugees in the first place, because most refugees, let's face it, don't have anyone here in Canada who is willing to support them for a year, along with their family, after they arrive in Canada. And most don't have sufficient wealth to establish that they can do it on their own.
That leaves them basically at the mercy of the UNHCR referral system, which can take years; it's very cumbersome. Because of the very small quota of refugees Canada accepts every year, people can be stuck in refugee camps for decades, literally. That's how you end up in that situation.
Aside from the limitations within the statutory framework, there are also some procedural difficulties that people face when they try to apply as refugees. I've included in the reference material I've sent over for you—I hope you've received your copy—a printout from the Immigration Canada website. It shows you what the processing times are for people who apply as refugees. The information is provided in English and in French.
It shows all of the different Canadian visa offices and how long they take to process sponsored refugees or government-assisted refugees. Of specific interest, Ugandan people would apply through the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi. If you look at the data for Nairobi, you will find that the processing times are really astronomical. If you're a privately sponsored refugee, you will wait 50 months to be processed to Canada. If you're a government-assisted refugee, you will wait 35 months to be processed for refugee status. That means three to four years of living in what are usually unsafe conditions.
There are also operational problems that confront the embassies. For example, there are government-imposed quotas on the numbers; the number of trained officers who are available to interview people is very limited; in addition, if the person isn't actually in Kenya and can't attend the embassy for the interview, they have to wait until such time as the embassy can send a visa officer to the country they are in to interview them. As you can imagine, that can take a long time.
You have to sympathize with the embassy staff. They don't have an easy job. They're trying to cope with a lot of applicants with very few resources and they're trying to schedule trips to interview people in countries that sometimes aren't even safe to go to.
It's also worth noting that many times, unfortunately, the decision-making of visa officers is a little bit lacking in the area of refugee determination. The area of refugee law is very complicated. It's been developed in the jurisprudence at a very advanced level, and it's not easy for a lay person to understand. If we compare the level of training that the visa officers receive with, say, the level of training a refugee board member in Canada would receive, there's simply no comparison.
A visa officer is expected to make a lot of different kinds of decisions. For example, one minute they could be looking at a work permit, the next minute they could be looking at a marriage sponsorship, and the next minute they could be analyzing a refugee applicant. The overall acceptance rate for refugees in Nairobi is currently sitting around 60%, which means that close to half of all claimants are refused. It's a pretty high refusal rate.
Don't get me wrong. I don't want you to misunderstand me. I'm not saying that visa officers are incompetent. They're definitely not; they're doing the best they can with what they have. But what they have is not a lot.
I also printed out in the materials for you a copy in English and French of the application kit a refugee would use if they wanted to apply to come to Canada as a refugee. If you look through it, you'll see that the kit is quite complex. It contains exhaustive instructions and a lot of data and requires a lot of supporting documentation as well. However, all of the information that is in those application forms and on the document checklist is required information. This is something the government needs in order to make the determination they need to make and in order to make sure the person is not a security threat. It's hard to know how you could simplify it; that would be difficult.
Finally, section 10 of the immigration and refugee protection regulations is the section that says what constitutes a perfected application or complete application. What it says, basically, is that if you send in your application with any of the data missing, or if any of the required documentation is missing, they don't even accept it as an application; they just mail it back to you. You can imagine that if you're an unsophisticated person, a refugee, who's applying to Canada and doesn't know anything about our system, there are so many ways you could go wrong in that application kit, and it would just be bounced back to you. You have to keep sending it until you get it right.
I have heard that Nairobi has some kind of private agency that pre-screens applications and charges people a fee, but refugees don't have to pay the fee, which can help them to fill out the forms and make sure the documents are there. I don't know a great deal about it, but I know it exists.
If you're looking for recommendations of what could be done to help these sexual minorities in Uganda, I would say that the existing system simply does not, as it stands, allow for refugees to be processed quickly to enter Canada if they're under a situation of threat. It simply doesn't exist. Probably the only way you might be able to do it is by a special program that would have to be in cooperation with the minister. It would have to be a special measure.
There is some historical precedent for this. For example, some of you may remember when the government brought the Kosovar refugees from Kosovo to Canada as part of a group resettlement; that was done as a special program. They also did something similar just a few years ago for the Burmese refugees, the religious minorities who were stuck in a refugee camp in Thailand. So it's not unprecedented; however, it would be an exception to the rule, just to be clear.
Someone might have a problem justifying why we should do something special for this particular group of people when there are many different groups of people out there who are under at least as much persecution and sometimes even more.
The other recommendations that I have are more to do with ways in which the system itself could be improved. I don't know whether you're interested in hearing about those, because it wouldn't specifically affect this group that you're looking at.
What I'll do is maybe turn it over for questions, and you can let me know what types of things you're interested in.
