Canada Wages War on Refugees: Palestinian Refugees Fight Back
We demand that the Right of Return be fulfilled. Until then, Palestinian refugees in the diaspora and internally displaced Palestinians need to be granted full economic, political and social rights.
From the Beirut Declaration 19 September 2004
Since declaring its bloody ‘war on terror’, the United States has not only changed its own immigration policies and procedures, but Canada’s as well. Canada’s new Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (2002) initiated an all out war on immigrants and refugees in this country. The main victims of this war have been poor people, specifically those from Arab and Muslim countries.
The two main weapons used by the Canadian state are
incarceration and deportation. The new laws allow border officials
to throw anyone in jail who they ‘suspect’ will not show up to
their refugee hearing. This means that these officials have full
discretion in making the decision about who to imprison.
Even if you are not in jail, the refugee determination process is
full of systemic obstacles that make it difficult for refugees to
protect themselves against deportation. The Board Members (judges)
are politically appointed by the ruling party in parliament which
means that they are not necessarily the most expert at this field
of the law. This is repeatedly demonstrated in shameful written
decisions rejecting refugee claims. Were they not used in the
context of justifying a human rights violation, these decisions
would have been laughable in light of their confused and often
ridiculous content. It used to be that two Board Members would
preside over a refugee claim. The new law removes one of them, and
in return offers an appeals process. The appeals process was never
instituted, and now a refugee claimant’s life is in the hands of
one political appointee.
After losing a refugee claim, options become very limited. The
claimant can apply to have their deportation stopped on the grounds
that they face a high risk of being harmed if deported. This
application is called a Pre-Removal Risk Assessment, and only a
tiny minority of them is successful (around 3-4%). A further option
is the Humanitarian and Compassionate application which is an
appeal to the Immigration Minister to grant status on the basis
that the person would face unusual, excessive, or undeserved
hardship if forced to apply for status from elsewhere.
One of the first organized struggles against this immigration
system came after Canada hosted the 2002 G8 summit and committed to
the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). As part of
its agreements with Algeria, the Canadian state agreed to lift a
moratorium that had stopped deportations to Algeria. Overnight,
over a thousand Algerians were slated for deportation. Algerian
refugees, particularly in Montreal, set up the Committee of
Non-Status Algerians and set out to pressure the government to stop
deporting members of their community. It was a long and hard fight
that peaked with the occupation of then Immigration Minister Denis
Coderre’s office on 30 May 2003 following his refusal to meet with
the refugees. The occupation was brutally suppressed; many of the
men were beaten up and tasered on their necks, backs, torsos and
genitals. One man was bashed on the head with the butt of a taser
gun, leaving a large gash on his forehead. Another man lost a tooth
as a result of being punched in the face by a police officer. This
brutality was followed by several deportations that reached their
climax with the deportation order for one of the committee’s
leading organizers, Mohammed Cherfi, who took sanctuary in a
Catholic church in Quebec City on 18 February 2004. Police raided
the church on the grounds of a criminal charge they had laid
against him, arrested him, dropped the criminal charge, and
deported him to the United States.
The Algerian committee’s political campaign was quite successful,
however, as the government created a special procedure for
Algerians living in Quebec to remain in Canada. Algerians in the
rest of the country, however, remained under the risk of
deportation. The Algerians’ struggle empowered many other
communities to take action, especially the Palestinian refugees in
Montreal.
Palestinian refugees are specifically targeted by the Canadian
refugee determination process. Every successful Palestinian refugee
claim or risk assessment is, in a sense, an indictment of Israel’s
abuse of Palestinian human rights. As such, the politics of
Canada’s benevolence towards Israel enters the courtroom, and the
fact that the Board Members are political appointees plays a major
role. People working on the legal front in the battle to stop the
deportation of Palestinian refugees have also noted that
Palestinian cases tend to be sent to particular Board Members who
develop reputations for denying Palestinians refugee status.
Out of this context emerged the Coalition against the Deportation
of Palestinian Refugees in February 2003. It started off with a
very small group of refugees who wanted to take their struggle for
status beyond the courtroom and into the political arena. The
Coalition grew, and political activists joined the refugees in
their organizing. Its demands are that the Canadian government
must:
1. Immediately stop the deportations of Palestinian refugee
claimants; and
2. Grant them permanent residency on Humanitarian and Compassionate
grounds.
The Coalition has received over 140 endorsements for their demands
from various groups in Canada and other countries.
There are two sides to the Coalition’s organizing. The first is the
legal battle to ensure that the refugees’ applications to the
Immigrant and Refugee Board (IRB) are properly filed, particularly
the Humanitarian and Compassionate applications which are the basis
of the second demand. The second is the political campaign which
has taken many forms. Members of the Coalition and their allies
hold a spirited weekly picket in front of the IRB offices in
Montreal. They have also created networks with various groups,
particularly immigrant and refugee rights activist groups. They are
part of a larger coalition of self-organized migrants called
Solidarity Across Borders, which includes the Action Committee of
Non-Status Algerians, the Pakistani Action Committee Against Racial
Profiling, Colombianos Unidos, the Support Committee for Basque
Political Prisoners, the Kurdish Institute of Montreal, and the
South Asian Women's Community Center. The Coalition has also
organized larger demonstrations to push for their demands, the
latest of which was on September 18 and drew over 1,000
demonstrators.
Another aspect of the political campaign is the awareness raising
work done by the Coalition. This work educates people on the racism
of the Canadian refugee determination system, the plight of
Palestinian refugees, and particularly the misery and brutality of
life in the refugee camps in Palestine and Lebanon to which they
may be deported. Politicians and members of parliament were sent an
information package entitled Stateless and Deported, which was
prepared by members of the Coalition, and some Parliamentarians
raised the issue of deporting Palestinians in the Parliament
itself.
The Coalition has now branched out to other cities in Canada such
as Toronto and Vancouver to the point where there is a national
campaign around the demands. This was a very important step in
light of the Algerian committee’s experience in which Algerians
outside Quebec were not protected by the Montreal-centered
campaign. Much of the work in these other cities, alongside the
arduous legal work, revolves around trying to get Palestinian
communities that live there to help in applying pressure on the
government to accept the campaign’s demands. The need for political
mobilization is becoming increasingly important as the deportation
dates for many of these refugees are just around the corner.
Deportation is a violation of a person’s human rights. The main
difference between this violation and others is that it is largely
not recognized as such by international law. The dominant view of
state sovereignty is still one that allows states to discriminate
with regards to who is legally allowed to be within the state’s
territory, even if that means sending someone to face such
brutality as Israeli state terrorism. The victims of such a system
are almost always the most defenseless: poor people and people
against whom there is much racism. These ‘illegal’ human beings
have very few options when the apparatus of the state aims to
deport them, either they submit or they hide in fear. A stark
example is that of Nabih, Khalil and Therese Ayoub (ages 69, 67 and
62 respectively) who have taken sanctuary in Montreal’s
Notre-Dame-de-Grâce church since January of this year so as not to
be deported back to Ein El Helweh refugee camp in Lebanon. But as
we have seen from the story of Mohammed Cherfi, even the age old
tradition of church sanctuary can be violated by the state. The
importance of initiatives like the Coalition becomes all the more
clear upon understanding that the injustices of such a system can
be eliminated only when people band together and fight back.
For more information contact, The Coalition Against the Deportation
of Palestinian Refugees, C/O QPIRG McGill, 3647 University Street,
3rd Floor, Montreal (Quebec) H3A 2B3, http://refugees.resist.ca/,
E-mail:[email protected], Telephone:(514)591.3171, Fax:
(514)398-8976.
Hazem Jamjoum is a member of the Toronto section of the Coalition
Against the Deportation of Palestinian Refugees, as well as Al-Awda
– The Palestine Right of Return Coalition and Sumoud: A Political
Prisoners Working Group