Citizenship and Immigration committee  In my view, it would fit. This is a belief. It's a spiritual belief. In my view, it would be captured by the existing legislation, and it wouldn't be necessary to amend the legislation. Actually, now that I think about it, Joel Chipkar himself was involved in this issue, because

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The way the regulations work is that normally you have to be outside your country to get refugee protection under the refugee definition and other Canadian laws. Canada has an exception for a few countries, six of them, and I see that the six are Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala,

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I should say I've got the board's statistics on my hard drive here, and it says that for 2005, there were 1,743 claims from China--all claims from China--decided in the calendar year, and 1,879 are still pending at the end of the calendar year.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The board doesn't break out the statistics that way. It's just by country.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The concern here is not just with the board or the pre-removal risk assessment; it's also what happens afterwards. For instance, there was the case where somebody was removed who the Falun Dafa Association had identified. The board said it was not credible and didn't believe she

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's true that we have been asked to do this. The reason we've been asked to do it is that unlike the other persecution that you've heard of, which is well documented--we have witnesses, we have Amnesty--this particular accusation has been meet with disbelief, even amongst people

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, yes. In fact there was the case of the Chinese consul in Calgary. There's a hate crime unit in Edmonton that recommended to the Attorney General prosecution for incitement to hatred. It's an offence that requires the consent of the Attorney General--the police can't actuall

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There was a determination to that effect in the context of a refugee claimant called Guang Sheng Han. This is a reported case. He was excluded on the basis that he was complicit in crimes against humanity because he was in charge of a prison where the Falun Gong were being persec

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm going to talk first, but I'm not going to talk the longest. I'll try to be brief. What I want to talk about is the general legal framework for the sorts of remedies we're asking this committee to endorse. We're asking the committee to resolve that the Government of Canada, f