Mr. Speaker, I stand to support this private member's bill. It is long overdue that Canada have a refugee appeal division. Parliament has debated this issue several times, as has the Senate. Parliament has approved and said several times that we must implement a refugee appeal division, yet no action has been taken.
Let me tell members why we should not have refugees' lives determined by one single person. A refugee board member could send someone back to face persecution, torture or even death. We used to have board members, and the panel would make decisions. In the 1980s, it was three members. Then it was narrowed down to two members. In 2002, it became one member.
When the decision was made in 2002 that it would be one member, there was a promise that there would be an appeal process, but the former Liberal government never actually made that a reality.
The problem with having one person decide the fate of refugees is that some people have biases. Even just recently the minister appointed people, it seems to me, based on their Conservative membership, whether they were active in the party or not. We had failed candidates known to have homophobic points of view appointed to the Immigration and Refugee Board. We had an appointee with a shady past in terms of that person's ties to a government that has been known to have human rights violations. Yet these are the group of people from whom one person would make the decision on the life and death of refugees.
The Canadian Council for Refugees has documented different examples of how decisions are made in a very inconsistent manner. In one case, there were two Palestinian brothers who had the same basis for their refugee claim, yet one was accepted and the other one was refused. The refused brother was deported. They were identical cases.
In another example, a person came from Iran. She had been arrested and detained for two months in Iran. Canada's refugee board concluded that this person, called Ms. Q, was not credible because of inconsistencies and gaps in her evidence.
Ms. Q told the board that she had scars on her body from the torture. Her testimony was rejected because she had not provided a medical report.
The psychologist who saw her said she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, which is why her submission was not as consistent as it could be. The doctor discovered that she had a depression in her skull consistent with a blow from a blunt instrument, and the psychologist found that she had been tortured and that if she were deported to Iran she would be in serious trouble. Even though there is expert evidence that she was severely tortured, this woman is facing imminent risk of removal from Canada.
There are two other examples. One is a gay man from Nicaragua who was deemed not to be gay enough and was turned down. Another woman, a lesbian from Ghana, even though she was tied to a pole, humiliated and spat upon, was also denied.
A refugee from Mexico came here. His mother and sister had been raped. Soldiers then tortured his father. He himself had his hands tied behind his back and was hit in the stomach. A hood was put over his head. He was questioned about where his uncle was hiding. They stripped him and cut him near his genitals with a knife. They then tied his testicles and yanked them while they continued to torture and question him. Lastly, they dipped his head in a tub filled with excrement in an attempt to obtain information they wanted.
These are the kinds of people we deny, because some members turn down 80% of the refugee claimants in front of them. Another member would approve 80%. As has been reported recently in the news, 80% of refugee claims that came before one board member were approved. So where is the consistency in terms of this board?
Remember, this board is made up of political appointees, and people have personal biases. When there is no appeal process, what one sees is real inconsistency in decision-making, yet we are talking about people's life and death.
Canada is one of the very few countries in the world that fails to give refugee claimants an appeal on their merits. UNHCR, which is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Amnesty International, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Canadian Bar Association have all said that Canada must have a refugee appeal division. Yet, over and over again, that has not taken place.
Ministers have repeatedly said that one could apply to a court to get leave. However, going to Federal Court is extremely expensive. It is expensive for the applicants and for the Canadian taxpayers. One must first receive leave or permission from the court. Nine out of 10 applications for leave are refused by the court and there is really no reason given. If we had an appeal division, most of these cases would not land in the Federal Court, which means that taxpayers would in fact save money. The Federal Court is really not set up to specialize in refugees cases anyway.
Refugee claimants may apply for a pre-removal risk assessment, but this is not a mechanism for correcting errors in the initial refugee determination. Pre-removal risk assessment applicants can only raise new evidence, not argue that the initial decision by the Immigration and Refugee Board was wrong. As a result, only 3% of those applications have been approved. Those who apply for humanitarian and compassionate grounds get deported anyway while their applications are being considered, so that is really not a route to go.
For all those reasons, it is quite unfortunate that Canada, even though condemned by many international organizations, continues to ignore the rights of refugees and continues to waste taxpayers' money with a lot of cases stuck in Federal Court. We continue to have a huge backlog and continue to make mistakes and occasionally send refugees back to their home countries where they face torture, persecution, much suffering, and sometimes even death. There is certainly documentation of that.
I urge this House to quickly approve this private member's bill, have it fast-tracked—