Canada Wages War on Refugees: Palestinian Refugees Fight Back

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