Protected faster, or fewer protected? The peril of ‘safe’ countries
Salvator Cusimano, a former intern with the Fahamu Refugee Programme, works at Romero House, an agency in Toronto’s West End that houses and assists refugee claimants. He holds a MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Clarendon Scholar. This article has been reprinted with the author’s permission from Embassy News.
In October, Immigration Minister Chris Alexander quietly but triumphantly named five more ‘safe’ countries, or countries that don’t normally produce refugees. In the midst of high-profile debates over Canadian policy toward Syrian refugees and health-care coverage for refugee claimants, the announcement was scarcely reported in the media.
It deserves a closer look: any person hailing from one of the 42 ‘designated countries of origin’ who claims refugee status, will experience no right to work, shortened timelines for preparing their case and no chance to appeal a negative decision. Until a recent court decision, they had virtually no access to health care—and even that decision could be reversed pending government appeal.
The goal? ‘Ensuring that genuine refugees get protection faster, while those with unfounded claims are sent home more quickly,’ according to Minister Alexander. Seems to make sense: people from these countries don’t need our protection, says the government, so let’s get them out of Canada more quickly, freeing up resources for those in need.
But far from calling more countries safe, the government should immediately scrap the DCO list.
First of all, we don’t need a list of safe countries to weed out people who don’t qualify for refugee status: our refugee determination system already does that.
Refugee status is granted in recognition of individual circumstances, not general risk. The determination process asks whether an individual person faces persecution and tests whether their government is willing and able to protect them, personally.
Through this process, DCOs have attained acceptance rates comparable to some very dangerous, repressive countries. Between January and June 2014, Canada granted refugee status to 37 percent of Hungarian claimants, 31 percent of Mexicans and 50 percent of Slovakians—all DCO citizens—compared to 38 percent of Congolese, 39 percent of Chinese and 39 percent of Haitians.
In other words, even a seemingly safe or democratic country may be home to thousands of persecuted people, targeted by extremists and unprotected by the authorities. That includes Mexicans targeted by gangs and drug cartels with serious firepower, or Eastern Europe’s Roma population.
That’s why it’s so troubling that hundreds of people from DCOs have been denied health care and procedural rights, and branded as fraudsters. People seeking safety have suffered needlessly, simply because of their nationality. Indeed, the Federal Court has already ordered the government to reverse the health-care cuts affecting DCO nationals.
If the government will not immediately scrap the DCO list, it should make the reasoning behind country designations public. Although the government has published a series of ‘qualitative and quantitative thresholds,’ these are vague in crucial areas and permit much political discretion.
The result is that countries that would not appear to be safe for certain minorities or activists have made the list. Take Romania, for example, a newly listed DCO. Are Roma Romanians protected against threats of violence?
I’m no expert on Romanian politics. But if an institution as conservative as the World Bank reports that ‘discrimination and exclusion are interwoven into different elements of their daily existence and persist throughout their entire lives,’ I’m willing to bet that for some Roma Romanians, the answer is no.
So instead of having an open discussion about our refugee system, we are left to speculate why certain countries have been deemed safe.
One explanation for the composition of the list is that it’s embarrassing to accept refugees from trading partners. Is it a coincidence that Canada added several European Union countries to the list just months after concluding a free trade agreement with the EU? Is it a coincidence that Mexico, our gang-riddled, drug-war-weary NAFTA partner, made the list?
What principles are determining our refugee policy? Until we have more information about the process—and the politics—behind designating safe countries, the government cannot defend its DCO list as a measure that ‘ensures that those who genuinely need Canada’s protection get it faster.’
Indeed, the numbers say otherwise.
When the government created its DCO list in December 2012, the Immigration and Refugee Board announced that its planned funding for refugee protection activities would drop 40 percent, from CAD $72.3 million in 2012-13 to just CAD $43.9 million in 2013-2014. Perhaps as a result, many new cases are already behind schedule, even though claims have fallen to around 10,000 annually. That’s in addition to about 30,000 claims already backlogged in December 2012, many of which have now waited nearly three years with no resolution in sight.
If the government is, as it says, interested in improving the system for people needing protection, it should scrap the DCO list; restore procedural rights to allow claimants to prepare adequately for hearings, with the security of health care and the right to work; and provide additional resources to allow the IRB to at least restore its planned spending, in order to process current claims and clear the backlog.
If the government keeps its DCO list, Chris Alexander should release a detailed and transparent description of the DCO selection process, specifically explaining how so-called safe countries like Hungary and Mexico could produce hundreds of refugees yet still satisfy quantitative and qualitative designation criteria. Meanwhile, each political party should commit to scrapping the list should they come to power in next year’s election.
Designated countries of origin
Source: Citizenship and Immigration Canada
