In a ruling released Monday, Justice Mary Gleason slammed Canadian visa officials in the Rome embassy for their “lack of objectivity.” She ordered that a different visa office review the case within 90 days and awarded the claimant, former Mississauga resident Adel Benhmuda, $5,000 in court costs.
It’s a rare ruling that takes aim at what some lawyers describe as an all-too-common attitude, one that robs too many asylum seekers of a fair hearing.
“It’s a double whammy,” said Benhmuda’s lawyer, Andrew Brouwer, referring to the ruling and awarding of costs. “It makes it particularly clear that the court is not happy about this kind of behaviour. It can’t continue.”
Benhmuda, his wife and their four children — including two born in Canada — were deported to Libya in 2008, after Canada rejected Benhmuda’s claim for refugee status. At the time, Libya was still in the grips of dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Benhmuda says he was detained on arrival in Tripoli and jailed for a total of six months on two separate occasions.
During that time, he says, prison guards regularly bound his bare feet, strung him up in the air and beat his soles with batons and electrical wires. The family then fled to the island of Malta and spent nine months living in a shipping container before being granted refugee status and moving to an apartment. In February 2011, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees formally asked Canada to resettle them as refugees.
The case came to national prominence when the Star wrote of the family’s ordeal in June 2011. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney rejected accusations that Canada had deported Benhmuda to torture, and promised to give the family’s request to return to Canada “every humanitarian consideration.” But in November 2011, their request was tersely rejected. Brouwer appealed to the federal court.
The federal court ruling makes clear the Benhmudas never stood a chance at a fair hearing. The ruling points to a string of “offending” emails from immigration officer Laurent Beaulieu, who at the time was based in Rome. One email “indicated that the entire Rome visa post had reached the conclusion that the applications were to be dismissed, before they had even been submitted,” Justice Gleason wrote.
The ruling refers to a tense “tug-of-war” over the case between Ottawa and the Rome visa post. As early as March 2011, email exchanges show Ottawa immigration officials pushing their colleagues in Rome to consider Benhmuda’s humanitarian request to return, and Rome-based officials flatly rejecting it.
“These (rejection) statements were made based on incomplete and inaccurate information, were repeated in several emails from Officer Beaulieu and were made before the applications were even filed and before the applicants were interviewed,” Gleason says.
A case analysis by Beaulieu in April 2011 is typical of the arguments from the Rome visa post. It accused the Benhmudas of having spent eight years in Canada “at public expense” while awaiting their refugee ruling. It claims the Benhmudas used up all their appeals before being deported. It accuses them of shopping around for asylum, despite having refugee status in Malta. And it concluded: “It is likely that this family will be in need of social assistance and other social services.”
These accusations, Gleason wrote, are wrong. The Benhmudas had not exhausted their appeals before being deported. Benhmuda, now 44, juggled two jobs while in Canada, one as a truck driver and the other in an optical lab. His application to return to Canada included a letter from his former employer at the lab promising him a job.
Gleason also noted that Beaulieu didn’t consider “the incarceration and torture of Mr. Benhmuda” after Canada deported him to Libya. Benhmuda initially sought asylum in Canada after being repeatedly and harshly questioned by Libyan police, who demanded to know the whereabouts of his brother, a member of a group fighting at the time to overthrow Gadhafi’s regime.
Beaulieu also failed to consider the UNHCR’s assessment when it asked Canada to resettle Benhmuda and his family, Gleason wrote. The UN agency suggested a bleak future for the Benhmudas in Malta, a Mediterranean island of 400,000. It is crowded with African refugees, has no refugee integration policy, and racism creates “an environment of fear, tension and mistrust,” the UNHCR said.
“Officer Beaulieu clearly prejudged the applicant’s claims, jumping to conclusions before he had even received a formal application,” Gleason wrote. “Moreover, his conclusions were based on inaccurate information.”
In September, after Beaulieu left the Rome office, another immigration officer from the visa post went to Malta to interview the Benhmudas about their request to return on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. Yet the case file included Beaulieu’s emails and analyses. The new officer rejected the request. In dismissing the decision as tainted, Gleason noted that much of the reasoning used by the new officer echoed Beaulieu’s biased views.
Told about the ruling Monday, Benhmuda was subdued. “We don’t want to get our hopes up,” he said in a telephone interview. Benhmuda, who is unemployed, added he won’t give the news about the review of their application to his four sons, aged 9 to 17, just yet. They’ve been through a roller-coaster of emotions since leaving Canada, a country they considered home and left in tears.
“I told them not to think about Canada any more,” he said. “I don’t want to give them hope, and then they’ll be hurt again. Until I get a final decision, it’s better they don’t know.”
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Sandro Contenta
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