Sure.
The protection issue arises in a different way in the security certificate, so I sympathize with your lack of understanding of it, and you're not alone in that. I've talked to lawyers who deal with these things, and they are also confused. I think that speaks to the way in which the law is written and also to the fact that there has been no accompanying explanation by the government to the changes they have brought in this regard in Bill C-3. So we also have questions about what is intended by this.
We have two situations with security certificates in relation to protection. In one case, you have somebody who does not have refugee protected-person status. They have not yet been found to be a refugee. That person, under the security certificate process, is able to make an application under section 112 of IRPA, which is the pre-removal risk assessment process.
If you are subject to a security certificate, you are not eligible for a full PRA, but only for a specific type of PRA, which is spelled out in section 113, which is based on a balancing, on the one hand, of the risk to the person if they were removed from Canada, versus the risk to Canada because of the danger they constitute. This evaluation is done by a civil servant, not by the Immigration and Refugee Board, not by the Federal Court judge.
The question we have—and we have a number of questions, but what I was particularly focusing on—is the fact that this civil servant is making an evaluation saying “Okay, they're going to face a certain amount of risk if they're sent back, but we consider them to be this amount dangerous.” Let's say we give it a scale of one to ten and the civil servant says “Okay, this is a number seven risk person to Canada or danger to Canada.”
At the same time the Federal Court judge is looking at this very issue, potentially—that's normally what you would think the security certificate is about—they're hearing the secret evidence, they're testing that, and they may be saying, “Okay, with this person, there are some concerns about maybe the people they've been associating with,” but the Federal Court judge may think, “Well, they're only a level three danger to Canada.” Yet this protection decision has been made over here by the civil servant without it having any connection to the Federal Court process.
The second issue we're raising is around section—