The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled 8-0 that a regulatory provision designating the United States as a “safe third country” to which most asylum seekers arriving at the Canada-U.S. border can safely be returned to make their refugee claims is not ultra vires nor an infringement of their Charter s. 7 rights to liberty and security of the person.However, the top ...
On Parliament Hill, three human rights organizations respond to the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling on the constitutionality of the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement. The top court has ruled that the agreement recognizing the two countries as safe places for asylum seekers is constitutional.Taking part in the news conference are representatives from groups that, alongside eight plaintiffs, launched the ...
The Current with Matt Galloway Hundreds of international students from India have been threatened with deportation after their original offers to study in Canada turned out to be fake. We discuss what might happen next, and what needs to happen to protect students from immigration scams.
Warda Shazadi Meighen is an immigration partner at Landings LLP and an adjunct professor of refugee law at the University of Toronto. Until 2004, when the Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement was signed, asylum seekers could enter Canada in an orderly manner by presenting themselves at an official port of entry at the Canada-US border. Once the agreement came into effect, however, ...
Immigration detention on the grounds of identity is not novel in international law – many states reserve the right to detain foreign nationals where their identity is unknown. Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) permits Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) to detain foreign nationals where the minister is not satisfied as to the person’s identity. Canadian jurisprudence has continually ...
Raised by his great-grandmother in the Dominican Republic, Fili has few memories of his parents or his sister and two brothers, who were both murdered. When his only caregiver died, the young boy, then about 10, moved in with friends he met on the streets and started catching fish and unloading cargo at a shipping port to provide for himself. ...
It seems like an unremarkable site. A temporary building made of corrugated steel. A single white pillar outside, marking the official line between two countries. But for the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who have made the journey to that site over the past several years – many of them travelling for days, weeks, sometimes years just to get ...
The Current with Matt Galloway Thousands of asylum seekers enter Canada through Roxham Road in Quebec each year, but calls to close the unofficial border crossing are growing. Matt Galloway talks to Lovejoyce Amavi, a refugee and author who crossed at Roxham Road in 2017; Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, immigration critic for the Bloc Québécois; and Warda Shazadi Meighen, an immigration and ...
As allegations of five Chinese police stations located in Canada, including one in Vancouver, B.C., raise concerns of political interference, experts say the role of Chinese intelligence is far more widespread. Earlier this month, a friendship society in Richmond was visited by RCMP officers after the Spanish human rights groups Safeguard Defenders published a report alleging that Chinese "police service ...
The Current with Matt Galloway Claudia Zamorano spent the pandemic working as a housekeeper in a COVID-19 ward in a B.C. hospital — but now she and her family face deportation to Mexico within weeks. She tells Matt Galloway her story; and we hear more about the government’s backlog of immigration cases from Warda Shazadi Meighen, a partner at Landings ...
