Hours after the arrival of the second ship, the Sun Sea, in August of 2010, public safety minister Vic Toews said the federal government “must ensure that our refugee system is not hijacked by criminals or terrorists.”
Almost 500 men, women and children had been packed into the barely seaworthy 60-metre cargo ship. They had spent 12 weeks crowded together, seasick and surviving on limited rations of food and water. One person died during the trip.
The vessel was escorted to CFB Esquimalt by naval vessels. Canada Border Services Agency officials guided the 492 passengers off the ship, using black umbrellas to shield their faces from photographers.
Toews raised the possibility that members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, known as the Tamil Tigers — deemed a terrorist group by Canada — could be on board and in charge of the human smuggling mission.
He said the government had to ensure Canada’s generous refugee system is not abused by human smugglers.
Two years later, the government made good on that promise, passing a tough new refugee bill in June that comes into effect in December. It allows refugee seekers to be detained indefinitely while their claims are processed or the immigration minister decides to release them.
Asylum seekers who come to Canada by boat will be detained in provincial jails, as was the case with the Tamils on the MV Sun Sea and the MV Ocean Lady the year before.
That’s despite already overcrowded conditions, which human rights advocates warn are inappropriate for people fleeing persecution and war.
For a model, the Conservatives looked to Australia, which has had a mandatory detention policy for 20 years and is frequently dealing with migrant ships from Southeast Asia.
The problem, critics say, is that the Australian system has been an utter failure.
Australia has spent billions of taxpayer dollars locking up refugees in remote detention centres. Critics argue that has tarnished the country’s international reputation and has caused physical and emotional harm to genuine refugees.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney insists Canada’s new measures will provide a strong deterrent to anyone thinking of paying a human smuggler to cross the Pacific. Conservatives also say locking up asylum-seekers will prevent terrorists and criminals from disappearing into Canadian cities.
Critics call the Canadian plan a massive waste of taxpayer money that simply won’t work. They argue our old laws were effective in identifying — and locking up — refugees found to be security risks.
They also say the Australian example has shown mandatory detention is not deterring migrants.
The Canadian Council for Refugees warns the’ new law creates a two-tier system that treats would-be refugees who arrive by boat worse than the thousands of asylum-seekers each year who arrive by air. They say such two-tier treatment violates the UN convention on refugees.
While Australia and Canada share many similarities, geography sets them apart when it comes to attracting migrant ships.
Canada was faced with two boat arrivals in two years, a total of 568 people, including the 76 Tamil men who came aboard the Ocean Lady in October 2009. Australia had 1,798 people arrive by boat in July of this year alone.
“Four hundred and ninety-two people came aboard the MV Sun Sea, but it was treated as a national crisis,” said Vancouver refugee lawyer Douglas Cannon. “In fact, it’s one week’s worth of refugee claimants to this country. One week’s worth.”
Canada deals with 20,000 to 30,000 refugee claimants a year. Most arrive by air and the majority are government-assisted refugees, or people who have been accepted as refugees by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and are waiting for resettlement. Last year, more than 6,600 people made refugee claims in Canadian airports.
Canada remains one of the most generous nations in the world toward refugees. The government is increasing the total number of refugee resettlements each year by 20 per cent, so that by 2013, Canada will resettle up to 14,500 refugees and people in vulnerable situations each year, according to the Department of Citizenship and Immigration.
Canada takes one in 10 of the refugees resettled worldwide through the UN High Commissioner, more than almost any other country in the world.
But NDP immigration critic Jinny Sims said the Conservatives’ recent changes represent a major hardening in Canada’s attitude toward refugees.
“It transforms very, very dramatically the way we treat refugees when they first arrive in our country,” she said. “It actually transforms the image people have of Canada when they see the kind of laws we’re passing that seem to be very anti-refugee.”
High price for detention
On a trip to Australia two years ago, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney met refugee advocates from non-governmental agencies to talk about the effects of mandatory detention. Paul Power, CEO of the Refugee Council of Australia, and Paris Aristotle, head of Foundation House for Survivors of Torture and Trauma, were at that meeting.
“We certainly talked about the psychological impact, the self-harm, the significant mental health problems of people while they’re in detention, the fact of the slow recovery rates from that harm after those people are released from detention,” Power said. “We talked about the effect on children in detention
Also, mandatory detention is expensive, costing the Australian government almost $800 million a year.
‘Irregular arrivals’
Their warnings fell on deaf ears.
Canada’s new law, C-31, requires mandatory detention for so-called “irregular arrivals” — to include arrivals by boat or cases where human smuggling is suspected. The detention will be reviewed after the first 14 days and then every six months. Previously, detention was reviewed every 30 days.
Asylum seekers will be detained until the Immigration and Refugee Board makes a decision on their claims or orders their release. That means people could be in detention for lengthy periods as their refugee claims move through the system.
The average processing time for claims is 18 months. The majority of claims from the Sun Sea and the Ocean Lady are still being processed two and three years later. The fastest refugee claim from the Ocean Lady was processed in 27 months, and only 94 of the refugee claims have been completed in the 26 months since the Sun Sea arrived.
Catherine Dauvergne, a University of British Columbia law professor and expert in Canadian and Australian migration law, says the new law gives too much discretion to the immigration minister to designate a group as an irregular arrival, and to decide the length of someone’s detention.
“It really adds a political element to detention, which is one of the most worrying things about this scheme,” she said.
It’s also expensive.
It costs $239 a day to keep someone in immigration detention, or more than $87,000 a year. It cost the Canada Border Services Agency $24 million to intercept, process and detain the asylum seekers from the Sun Sea. That figure also includes anti-human smuggling efforts by CBSA officers overseas. The costs to the Immigration and Refugee Board, largely for detention reviews, was $900,000.
C-31 also took away the right of “irregular arrivals” to appeal the refugee board’s refusal of a claim. They can request a Federal Court review, but 99 per cent of those requests are turned down.
“The lack of appeal is a really very serious problem,” said Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees. “When you have some people who get access to appeal and others don’t, that just seems fundamentally unfair.”
Bill has harsh sanctions
The bill has harsh sanctions for refugees who arrive by boat, including a five-year ban on family reunification, permanent resident status and travel. Their claims can also be reassessed within five years and their refugee status could be revoked if the minister deems it safe for them to return home.
The policy is reminiscent of Australia’s temporary protection visas, which were abolished in 2008.
Introduced in 2001, the TPVs denied family reunification and permanent-resident status for asylum seekers who arrived by boat.
The plan backfired. Rather than slowing arrivals, the policy increased the number of women and children coming by boat. When a migrant ship dubbed SIEV X (short for suspected illegal entry vessel) was wrecked off Christmas Island in 2001, killing 353 people, many of the victims were women and children whose husbands and fathers were on temporary protection visas in Australia.
But Kenney said when Australia removed the temporary protection policy, it resulted in a major spike in boat arrivals.
“Between 2002 and 2008, the number of smuggling vessels was a tiny fraction of what it currently is,” Kenney said in an interview.
“One can see a huge and growing spike in a number of smuggling events in Australian waters.”
C-31 also includes a mandatory minimum sentence for people convicted of human smuggling, which Australia did away with because it found it was jailing underage Indonesian fishermen who had been paid a small amount to steer the boat.
“I was surprised when I saw the nature of the legislation that Jason Kenney was proposing after his meeting with us,” Power said. “He seemed to understand what our concerns were about the way in which asylum seekers have been treated in Australia and about Australia’s mandatory detention policy. But from the legislation that was developed, he took not one bit of notice of the concerns of the Australian community sector.”
Aristotle said it’s hard to see how the arrival of only two boats to Canada would justify a mandatory detention policy.
“The belief that mandatory detention can fix this for any country is a bit of a siren song,” Aristotle said. “It’s good politics but not very good policy.”
Kenney said the detention provisions are not meant to punish refugees, but are aimed at ensuring that people can be kept in detention while the necessary security checks are done.
“The enhanced detention provisions in the bill reflect the very concrete fact that when hundreds of illegal migrants show up at once, having destroyed their documents, that it is practically impossible for our system to readily identify them and determine their admissibility into Canada,” Kenney said.
He said the previous system meant the detention had to be constantly reviewed by the Immigration and Refugee Board — after 48 hours, then after a week and every month thereafter, which tied up resources and prevented legitimate claims from being processed faster.
‘Reckless and foolish’
Kenney promised the new system would be faster for “bona fide refugees,” who would receive a hearing in 30 to 60 days.
“It’s about actually having the time necessary to ensure we can identify people who have paid criminal networks tens of thousands of dollars to come here in violation of several Canadian laws.”
But Cannon said Canada’s old laws, the ones on the books before Bill C-31, were effective in identifying and detaining people deemed to be a security risk.
“We have more than sufficient processes to protect Canadians from people who would try to use the refugee system to try to enter Canada when they ought not to,” he said.
Cannon said to treat every asylum seeker on the boat as a security risk was “reckless and foolish.”
Before the arrival of the Sun Sea, Canada detained asylum seekers only while health, security and identity checks were done and then released them on bond or with requirements to report regularly to immigration officials.
While the Tamil asylum seekers from the Sun Sea or Ocean Lady were held in custody longer than asylum seekers who arrive by plane, most were released after an average of four months. And none have violated the conditions of their release, according to the Canada Border Services Agency.
Refugee detainees suffer
That has refugee experts in Australia asking why Canada is taking cues from that country’s mandatory detention policy when it has proven costly to the taxpayers, damaging psychologically to asylum seekers and unsuccessful in preventing boat arrivals.
Kon Karapanagiotidis, founder of the Melbourne-based Asylum Seekers Resource Centre, said Canada is following Australia’s sad record of exploiting vulnerable people for political gain. “The policies are nothing short of evil.”
Sarah Hanson-Young, a senator for the Australian Green party who was part of a parliamentary committee investigating the detention system, says Australia has not set an example that any country would want to follow.
“Mandatory detention has led to significant mental-health problems of refugees, people who are already suffering torture, trauma, the post-traumatic stress of the brutality that they fled, war, persecution,” said Hanson-Young. “I’d say it’s a big failure.”
The parliamentary committee’s report, released in March, portrayed a system that spits people out much more damaged than when they came in. In many cases, the hopelessness, waiting and uncertainly is so unbearable, detainees have resorted to self-harm and suicide attempts.
More than 1,100 incidents of threatened or actual self-harm across all detention centres were reported in 2010-11. There have been six suicides in detention in the last two years.
Evidence suggests detainees’ mental health begins to erode after just three months, yet there are stories of refugees held in detention for more than two years.
The parliamentary committee’s key recommendation was a maximum of 90 days’ detention for processing and health and identity checks. After that, it said, individuals should be released into the community, with a requirement to report regularly while they await the outcome of their refugee claims.
Those recommendations have been largely ignored.
Scrambling to control a spike in boats in the past two years that has resulted in hundreds of deaths at sea, Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced a return to offshore processing for boat arrivals.
Refugees intercepted
By intercepting refugees outside Australia and processing them on overseas territories rather than Australia itself, Australia gets around the right of would-be refugees to claim asylum when they arrive in a country.
Camps have been set up on the Micronesian island of Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, and asylum seekers could be kept there for years.
The rate of asylum seekers arriving on Australian shores unexpectedly increased after the offshore measures were adopted in August.
Jo Szwarc, manager of policy and research at Foundation House, says the return to the offshore processing scheme is evidence the mandatory detention system, supposed to act as a deterrent, has failed.
“I would urge Canadians and the Canadian government to look very closely at the Australian experience and learn what is bad about it. It’s not a model one would want to follow if you were mindful of all evidence,” Szwarc said.
“We’ve seen that it’s expensive and damaging to lock people up for extended periods. So really the big question is why would you do it?”
Original Article
Source: canada.com
Author: KATIE DEROSA
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