Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on May 11th, 2017

[Asma Jahangir]

I don't know in what area you want me to deliver my remarks on Iran. I'm afraid I'm poorly assisted in this way; I did not have the agenda of what area you want me to address. Generally speaking, I know that's it's human rights, but if you want me to address you in the sense of what my priority area is, I'd be happy to do that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Sure. We have two witnesses who have given us an in-depth review of LGBTQ rights. Maybe you can focus your remarks a little bit on women's rights and also on what you're finding in terms of the occurrence of torture and execution this year.

I know you're new to this role. We heard from Dr. Shaheed last year at our Iran Accountability Week. If you can take five or seven minutes to just give us a bit of an overview, I think that would be most valuable for this committee.

[Asma Jahangir]

Thank you very much.

My first statement would be that I am extremely concerned about the upsurge in arrests of people who are people political activists. When I say “political activists” that doesn't mean they belong to political parties, but they are people who are politically aware. Obviously women are among those people who are under arrest, and they are political prisoners.

If you want me to focus just on women's rights, I am happy to do that, but I think it goes hand in hand with the overall political and human rights situation in Iran. You can't just pluck it out and say, “Yes, women's rights are suffering deplorably.” So are minority rights. So are ethnic rights.

It is the whole atmosphere of fear that prevails there, and as the May election comes nearer and nearer, dissenting voices are being thwarted and people are being tortured. People are being harassed. People are being picked up. But if you want me to focus purely on women's rights, I'm happy to do that too.

This is a story that is not just about current affairs. This has being going on for some time, and the latest thing is that women who want to contest the election for President are obviously not allowed.

This is only symbolic of what is happening to the vast majority of women in Iran, where you cannot even decide what kind of dress to wear, and interaction between women and men is very restricted. There is not just a glass ceiling;. there is an iron ceiling for women's upward mobility.

In every field of life women are controlled. Family laws are very controlling. I can give you many examples of how women are being harassed and how women are being persecuted in many ways, simply because they happen to be women.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Ms. Jahangir, I'm happy for you to provide us again with just a bit of an overview of the issues you feel are most important in terms of the human rights abuses and what you've found and identified in your first number of months in office. I'll leave it to you to select a couple of illustrative areas to relate to this committee. Obviously, we're concerned about human rights writ large in Iran.

[Asma Jahangir]

Sorry, I can't hear you properly.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

I leave it to you. If you would like to pick a couple of areas and give us some examples, that would be fine. They don't have to relate just to women. You may choose whichever areas you feel are going to best reflect the issues of human rights in Iran, which is what we are clearly seized with during this Iran Accountability Week.

[Asma Jahangir]

Thank you very much.

Let me, for example, start with the aspect that If you are dissenting and you're a man, you're treated badly, but if you're a woman, you are treated even worse. That is a distinction that I would draw there. Women lawyers who dissent, for example, will be reprimanded much more. I'm not saying that men are spared this, and don't take me as saying that they're spared, but there is an extra, awful, and very devious way of dealing with women there in terms of trying to torture them.

You don't have to even physically torture them. There are reports of cases in which you are humiliated, in which your sexual organs are being discussed in public, if you are in prison. You are asked personal questions that are unrelated to what your life is all about, and tough personal questions, which are socially unacceptable. There's a lot of talk about tradition and social norms in Iran, but when they want to persecute women, it all disappears.

Then there's the fact that women prisoners are tortured in the sense that they're kept away from their children. They will be told that their child is going to see them, but then the meeting is cancelled. It's a very insidious kind of torture for a mother. Then it's put off until a week later that the child is coming to see them, and the child doesn't turn up. What is happening to the child? The mother is not being told what is happening.

Many women have also written to me from prison about hearing children crying when they come to see their mothers and they have been separated from their mothers. Also there is the fact that in universities and educational departments, women are sexually harassed and there is impunity for it, but if a woman wants to sit with a man according to her own wishes, she is not allowed to do it. There is a kind of sexual control over them in that sense.

It's all very well to say, all we want is for you to wear a head scarf and you can do whatever you want. It's not correct. Even politically women cannot contest certain elections; women cannot get to certain polls; and if you look at the family law for women, they're very much subjugated and under the control of the male partner. A woman needs permission from her male partner about how she behaves, where she travels, and where she goes.

If the example is given to me that women are great entrepreneurs in Iran, it may be true, but it's no thanks to the Government of Iran.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you very much, Ms. Jahangir. We will move on.

Mr. Tabbara, I think you have a couple of minutes left, and then we're going to move to MP Garrison.

Please continue.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Yes. One second here....

[Kimahli Powell]

I wonder if I could help finish the question that was asked.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Sure.

[Kimahli Powell]

It's about civil society.

I think it's important to understand how exactly we are able to help individuals who request our help and who need a pathway to safety. We have to do three things. We have to be able to verify the case through any means necessary. We have an army of volunteers around the world who help us do that, but an important piece of it is to connect the individual with an organization of some sort that can give immediate support.

We're usually talking about individuals who are facing immediate persecution of some sort, and they're facing an immediate threat. Arsham laid it out very clearly. There is a limited number of mechanisms. Sometimes Facebook and social media are key drivers. WhatsApp is a means of communication; sometimes they'll find my own personal information and I get requests. The linkage to civil society is crucial.

I think it's important to know that the crackdown on civil society in Iran is not just limited to LGBTQI-2 spirit organizations. We would be happy to work with any human rights organization that is able to assist these individuals, but if the civil society there does not, or even if the human rights organizations do not accept LGBTQI2-S individuals in that space, then it's impossible to get the individual the support they need to ultimately leave the country.

Those are the unique challenges that these Iranians face.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you, Mr. Powell.

Mr. Tabbara, do you have any last questions?

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

I just want to ask Ms. Asma Jahangir something if she is still on the line.

You mentioned a lot about women and their rights. In the case of rape or other incidents that conflict with women's rights, a lot of women are hesitant to come forward in places like Iran. Even in our North American society, there is a lot of pressure for women to come out, because they may feel that certain authorities may not listen to them or may not believe them, or there is embarrassment. But particularly in Iran, what are some of the challenges that women face when they're faced with these types of situations?

[Asma Jahangir]

Can I take your last question first?

As a woman, you don't have to be raped to feel violated. There are many ways of raping a woman, psychologically and emotionally. I think this is what some governments have learned to do. When you talk about a woman's body in her presence and in the presence of her family in a traditional society like Iran's, it is like raping her. When you talk about a woman as being very promiscuous and have social media campaigns against her, it is more or less raping her.

This is not to say that I do not have reports of raping of women, but I am not going that far. It is the whole attitude towards women.

You don't have to kill people, but you can subjugate them; you can kill their spirit. The dictatorships of the world are learning very fast how to kill people's spirits without physically killing them, and this is what we need to learn about.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you very much, Ms. Jahangir.

[Asma Jahangir]

As far as social media is concerned, I don't depend on every report I get from social media. I verify my reports from inside Iran, most of the time. I salute the people inside Iran who have, despite everything, fought hard to communicate to the outside world. This emphasizes how resilient they are.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you very much.

We're running low on time. I want to pass the floor over to MP Garrison.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I want to return to Mr. Powell and Mr. Parsi.

First of all, I want to say thanks for the work that you and your organizations do every day.

As you do, I welcome the new government's statement that LGBTQ refugees would be a high priority, based on risk. I met immediately with the new immigration minister, and then I met with his successor, to ask what the government would do to make that promise a reality, to recognize that risk and make things happen. I cited both your organizations as examples of success, of how Canada might go about doing this.

I met with what I would call “institutional misunderstanding”, which was that LGBTQ refugees had the same access to the Canadian refugee system abroad as any other refugee would have. They could simply go into a camp and claim refugee status, as that would be easy, and if they were accepted and came here, they should get the same services and be settled with their community, just like any other refugee.

Maybe I'll start with Mr. Powell and ask him to talk about why that is or is not the case. I worry that the government will fold these pilots into general private sponsorship programs.

[Kimahli Powell]

I can answer that.

In response to the specific question of whether the situation is the same for an LGBTQI2-spirit individual as it is for another refugee, the answer is no. I think it's really important to understand that when people make an asylum claim or go through the system through private sponsorship, they are usually doing it as a family, in consultation with their community, or in a group of communities.

The people who request our help—over 700 last year—come to us as individuals. They are usually shunned by their families, or it's even the families that are inflicting violence.

To isolate those individuals going through the system is traumatic for them and puts them at risk. We have had instances of individuals going to camps in other countries—for example, Frankfurt—and finding real challenges within the population of refugees there.

Especially as Canada labels the LGBTQ2 community as a vulnerable population, that also needs to be reflected in immigration policy.

[Arsham Parsi]

Thank you so much for this question. It's very important. I have mentioned this several times. The last time I mentioned it was with the chairman. We had a meeting in Toronto with the Prime Minister's special adviser on LGBTQ.

In Turkey, we process mostly LGBT refugees, not only Iranian, but non-Iranian as well, since we are a charitable organization operating outside Canada. According to the UNHCR office in Ankara, Turkey, as of May 2016, they had 1,172 LGBTQ cases, of which 1,046 were from Iran. The next country was Iraq, with 62 people. In total, there are 1,200 LGBTQ refugees in Turkey out of a total of two million refugees. They are a very small group of people who are being discriminated against, not only by Turkish society—with homophobia and everything—but even by the other refugee groups. Migration doesn't mean that people change their mentality and values. They bring their values with them. They just pick up their luggage and bring what they believe. If someone is homophobic, it doesn't matter whether they live in Iran or in Canada.

My response is that they need to be prioritized as the most vulnerable refugees however the UNHCR prioritizes them. Canada, in the last several years, prioritized them in order for them to be resettled in Canada, but unfortunately it's been a while since they've been coming to Canada. They were put on hold.

A group of people are in a very bad situation. I don't want to give bad information, but last week two people committed suicide in Turkey because they couldn't wait, especially with the Trump administration's travel ban. It's a very tough situation for LG— [Technical difficulty—Editor].

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Our time is up, actually. This concludes our testimony.

To our three witnesses, we faced technical challenges today, which I apologize for, but we did get your testimony on the record. I'm glad we got to engage with you. You brought an important message to our Iran Accountability Week. It will be part of the comments we make in our concluding statement, which will go out later today or tomorrow.

Mr. Parsi, I just want to thank you as well for bearing with us through the technological challenges we faced this afternoon. Your testimony was valuable, and we appreciate it.

[Arsham Parsi]

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you very much.

The meeting is adjourned.