Evidence of meeting #59 for Subcommittee on International Human Rights in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was refugees.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Conservative
Humanitarian Representative to Canada, Doctors Without Borders
Thank you.
We're at a staggering moment. There are more forcibly displaced people around the world today than at any other time in modern history. Many of the people who are caught in impossible situations of acute and high-intensity violence must flee to survive, yet while more people require life-saving humanitarian assistance than ever before, we're also witnessing alarming gaps in responses to large crises of forced displacement.
I'm going to speak to you about three specific crises involving forced displacement: Sudan, the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Rohingya crisis. Each is a distinct crisis, but all are characterized by inadequate global action despite massive humanitarian needs.
This April marked one year since conflict engulfed Sudan, forcibly displacing millions of people internally and into neighbouring countries such as South Sudan and eastern Chad. Today, the situation is worse than ever. Hundreds of thousands of people are facing immense suffering including malnutrition, trauma and a lack of access to basic health care.
Earlier this month, MSF was forced to stop outpatient treatment for 5,000 children with acute malnutrition in Zamzam displacement camp in north Darfur because warring parties blocked deliveries of food, medicines and other essential supplies. There are 2,900 of these children under the age of five with severe acute malnutrition. Their lives are now in immediate danger.
Meanwhile, in the North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people are urgently in need of food, shelter, drinking water and protection from sexual violence amid violent conflict between multiple armed groups, including government forces. In 2023, MSF-supported clinics provided care to 20,556 survivors of sexual violence, which is roughly two survivors of sexual violence every single hour.
This alarming situation has deteriorated further. MSF teams treated nearly 70% of the total number of survivors of sexual violence in 2023 in just the first five months of 2024. In September, eastern DRC was also the epicentre of the current Mpox epidemic in Africa, a virus that will be impossible to contain unless efforts are made to improve the appalling living conditions displaced people have been struggling with for too long.
MSF is the main provider of health services inside the fenced Rohingya refugee camps in Cox's Bazaar in Bangladesh, where roughly one million people live. Here, people who have fled violence and persecution today find themselves contained and are prohibited from accessing education or employment. Just this summer, an MSF survey revealed that almost one in five people tested for hepatitis C had an active infection, but a lack of capacity in the camps means that many Rohingya people are going to miss out on treatment and being cured.
Seven years ago, Canada took a leadership role in the global response to the Rohingya crisis, but today, Canada has seemingly failed to renew its Rohingya strategy after it expired in March 2024. Canada needs to honour the commitment that it made to the Rohingya people and to the humanitarian community and renew and properly resource its strategy immediately.
People's lives are further endangered by attempts by states and other actors to contain, deport and deter people from seeking safety in other countries. Harmful policies do not deter people from fleeing violence and seeking safety, but they do force people into impossible situations, such as making perilous journeys across dangerous seas where thousands of people routinely die.
Canada should not only be responding to these humanitarian and political crises but should also be denouncing policies that prevent people from escaping situations of violence and deprivation and that increase their vulnerability.
I want to thank the committee for taking the time to look into these issues and the role that Canada can play to address these emergencies. In DRC, Sudan, Bangladesh and beyond, minutes matter for people who are forced to flee their homes—
Humanitarian Representative to Canada, Doctors Without Borders
—and humanitarian assistance can make the difference between life and death. MSF is going to continue to respond, but humanitarians cannot stop wars, humanitarians cannot lift blockades and humanitarians cannot prevent the crises that today are driving alarming levels of displacement.
You have the voice and power to act decisively. Canada has a voice that needs to be fully engaged in addressing the problems that are today fuelling these humanitarian crises, and we hope that Canada can find the political will and the moral courage to continue to step up.
Thank you.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Fayçal El-Khoury
Thank you, Mr. Nickerson, for your declaration.
Now I would like to open the floor for questions and answers. I would like to start with Ms. Damoff.
You have the floor for seven minutes, please.
Liberal
Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON
Thank you so much, Chair.
Thank you to all of our witnesses for being here today.
Dr. Nickerson, it's so nice to see you again. I want to thank you for the work that you do around the world. It's so meaningful and impactful.
You mentioned climate change. Could you talk briefly about how that's impacting what you're seeing around the world?
Humanitarian Representative to Canada, Doctors Without Borders
We think of climate change in many of these crises as a crisis multiplier. We're trying to understand and untangle exactly what this means.
In our projects, in some instances, there are very clear medical impacts that climate change has, for example, changing patterns of disease. In some instances, diseases such as malaria have a seasonal routine or pattern to them, but we're seeing peaks of malaria that are more intense. We're seeing seasonal malaria cases arriving at different times and so on. Climate change, from a medical perspective, is in some instances changing the patterns of disease and making them more unpredictable.
From the perspective of forced migration, what we hear from people, in particular people who are dependent on agriculture for livelihoods and so on, is that, if soil becomes unusable, it becomes a bit of a complex integration of multiple things. If somebody is dependent on a climate-sensitive industry for economic viability, and they're living in a conflict setting and so on, this multiplies the level of stressors that a person is facing.
We are hearing in our projects more and more that people are saying that climate is impacting their ability to have a basic livelihood and is one of the factors that is contributing to a decision to flee, but that's often layered on top of underlying violence, conflict and other things as well.
Liberal
Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON
Once they've already fled, it would also cause.... I'm thinking of the Rohingya, in particular with flooding. You're in a refugee camp. You hardly have the capacity to deal with flooding, which would in turn lead to more disease in that camp, I would suspect.
Humanitarian Representative to Canada, Doctors Without Borders
Yes, absolutely. I'm a public health specialist. At the moment, we're responding around the world to more outbreaks of cholera than at any other moment in time. There's a global stockpile of cholera vaccines that's been depleted for more than two years. Some of that is due to market conditions, but it's also largely due to the fact that we're simply seeing more cholera. That's not all entirely dependent on climate change, but some of it certainly is.
This is a certain reality where, as climate is having an impact, particularly on infectious diseases, when we have outbreaks that occur on top of a refugee crisis or a forced displacement crisis or so on, we're going to run into a lot of different crises that are converging all in one place.
Liberal
Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON
MSF has used the language of a protection gap and then there's the emergence of the term survival migration. Can you explain what that is?
Humanitarian Representative to Canada, Doctors Without Borders
We're not a protection organization, so I don't think that we're necessarily the best placed to fully comment on protection gaps necessarily. We see this in our medical programs.
The statistics that I mentioned before around more than 20,000 survivors of sexual violence in our clinics is how protection gaps present in MSF programming. This is what we see. We see people who are victimized, people who have been assaulted and injured and who are in need of medical care, as a result of the failure of protection systems to adequately protect them.
Liberal
Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON
The previous witness from Oxfam—I don't know if you heard her talk—was talking about the increasing impact on women. My colleague also mentioned that.
Are you seeing, in the people you're dealing with, a change in demographics in who is fleeing?
Humanitarian Representative to Canada, Doctors Without Borders
I want to be cautious about making general assumptions about, you know, hundreds of millions of people because every crisis is quite different. The conditions that lead somebody to flee are going to be quite different and so on. We consistently see that women and children are among the most vulnerable in any humanitarian crisis around the world. However, I think we also need to recognize that gender plays a significant role in these crises. In some instances, we see men, for example, who might be specifically targeted because they are men, but the result is that we see more women in our programming who are fleeing and who are in need of medical care.
The short answer is yes. I mean, these vulnerabilities are very real. This is why, you know, from a public health perspective and as somebody who's worked on doing needs assessments and so on, it's very important to understand who is standing in line at the clinic, whether there is a significant gender disparity there, why that exists and so on. We need to make sure that programs are adequately identifying people who are most vulnerable and most in need and targeting specific strategies to reach them.
Liberal
Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON
I was in Costa Rica this summer and went to a migrant shelter. One of the things that I learned when I was there is that they're seeing more families. It used to be just men who were fleeing. It's now whole families, and the long-term mental health impact on those kids....
Are you seeing that in your work? I recognize that every country is different, and I don't know if you're working in Central America or not.
Humanitarian Representative to Canada, Doctors Without Borders
We have programming throughout Central America. The other witness has been an expert in protection issues and maybe has something to add, but, certainly, we're providing quite comprehensive primary health care. We're seeing a huge need for people to receive quite basic primary health care as they're fleeing whatever situation of violence. We're seeing massive mental health needs. People have been exposed to very high levels of violence. To your point, yes, certainly, it's families, it's women and it's children. We see a full sort of family unit in many of these programs.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Fayçal El-Khoury
I'd like to invite Mr. Majumdar to take the floor for seven minutes, please.
Conservative
Shuv Majumdar Conservative Calgary Heritage, AB
Thank you.
I'd like to keep it tight if that's possible.
First of all, Alexander Waxman, thank you for tabling your full report and for your initial introductory remarks. I look forward to reviewing them in detail.
Emmanuel Rincón, I wanted to talk to you about Edmundo González. The failure to recognize him as the legitimate Venezuelan leader, as you indicated in your testimony, comes at a cost, a direct cost in terms of how refugees are weaponized. Would you take just a minute to describe how weaponizing immigration is a tool that dictators like Maduro use to destabilize the region and entrench their hold on power?
Lawyer, As an Individual
Thank you.
In fact, in just the past month, the month of September, the migration through the Darién, which is a gap in Panama that people are using to go to the United States, has increased by 60% since Maduro stole the election, and the countries of the world are denying the real results that the opposition has shown.
Right now, what we have is a major crisis because Maduro is throwing away some people who were in jail from the criminal gang Tren de Aragua. Those people are hiding among normal people who are trying to migrate, and they are getting inside of our neighbouring countries. It's happening right now in Peru, in Colombia, in Ecuador, in Chile and also in the United States. Maybe it can happen in the future to Canada too.
The thing is that these people are right now robbing and killing people. In the past week, they also have been taken in real estate departments, and they are figuring out how to kidnap all those properties. They are really making a mess in all the region, so that is a big mess.
As I was saying at first, I think that the developed countries have the mission to not only provide a shelter to the people but also to fight for democracy in all of the hemisphere. The mission of Canada has to be to try to get democracy into our country, not trying to bring all the people, all the refugees, to this country, because that is what the dictator wants.
Conservative
Shuv Majumdar Conservative Calgary Heritage, AB
Thank you much for that.
It's often a misnomer that policies of appeasement might abate a refugee crisis when, instead, it enhances it, so I appreciate that.
Mr. Waxman, you've had 12 years of great practitioner experience across the world. In your testimony, I was struck by just how broken the international refugee system has become. I know that there are lots of calls for accountability, for more efficient delivery of services and to simplify ways in which refugees can access services.
Do you have some suggestions of things that you have seen that actually focus on accomplishing that accountability in the UN system?
October 29th, 2024 / 5:25 p.m.
Internally Displaced Persons and Refugees Protection Expert, for 12 years in sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Southeastern Europe with UN Humanitarian Agencies, As an Individual
Thank you for the question—it's a good one. I haven't actually seen anything within the UN system other than almost spreading out the need to conduct...so I'll speak specifically to refugee status determination. This is the process by which an asylum seeker, a person who's crossed an international boundary, is saying that they fear that they cannot go back to their country of origin. They have to prove that. Somebody has to basically, for better or for worse, interrogate them as to where they're from, and then figure out whether or not they meet the convention grounds.
That system, in itself, is weak, because the threshold for the burden of proof is the lowest possible threshold. It's not a criminal standard. It's not a civil standard. The benefit of the doubt is given to the claimant. Whatever the claimant says, the interviewing officer simply has to accept it at face value, more or less. Once the interview is done, he or she then goes to a series of reports, whether it's by Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. Those are often recycled reports.
I'll just pick something—let's say, an ongoing conflict in Somalia, or something like that. You have to prove that you're from south-central Somalia. How do I really know, as an interviewing officer, that you're from south-central Somalia? You could actually be a Kenyan Somalian posing as somebody from south-central Somalia. You just need to know a few facts. You speak the same language—Af Soomaali. You prove verbally that you're from a clan structure, which I simply just have on a sheet that's printed out in English for me. Then, if you have been coached to read from just a few lines of a Human Rights Watch report or Amnesty International—bing—you cannot be returned or refouled. Therefore, you go into the pipeline for resettlement.
I never saw anything within the UNHCR system to do that. On top of that, I also saw so-called reforms within UNHCR to then offshoot RSD from their own RSD unit to other agencies, like the Danish Refugee Council, for example.
