Nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s birthright citizenship order goes into effect

2025/07/21 Leave a comment

Of note:

President Donald Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship for the children of people who are in the U.S. illegally will remain blocked as an order from one judge went into effect Friday and another seemed inclined to follow suit.

U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante in New Hampshire had paused his own decision to allow for the Trump administration to appeal, but with no appeal filed in the last week his order went into effect.

“The judge’s order protects every single child whose citizenship was called into question by this illegal executive order,” Cody Wofsy, the ACLU attorney representing children who would be affected by Trump’s restrictions, said. “The government has not appealed and has not sought emergency relief so this injunction is now in effect everywhere in the country.”

The Trump administration could still appeal or even ask that LaPlante’s order be narrowed but the effort to end birthright citizenship for children of parents who are in the U.S. illegally or temporarily can’t take effect for now.

The Justice Department didn’t immediately return a message seeking comment.

Meanwhile, a judge in Boston heard arguments from more than a dozen states who say Trump’s birthright citizenship order is blatantly unconstitutional and threatens millions of dollars for essential services. The issue is expected to move quickly back to the nation’s highest court.

U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin was asked to consider either keeping in place the nationwide injunction he granted earlier or consider a request from the government either to narrow the scope of that order or stay it altogether. Sorokin, located in Boston, did not immediately rule but seemed to be receptive to arguments from states to keep the injunction in place….

Source: Nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s birthright citizenship order goes into effect

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship, Trump administration Tagged with ,

Korea: Court denies dual citizenship application, citing ‘birth tourism’

2025/02/25 Leave a comment

Of note:
A Seoul court has supported the rejection of an application for dual US-South Korean citizenship because their parent’s residence in the US was for the purpose of their child gaining US citizenship.The Seoul Administrative Court said Monday that it had ruled in favor of the Seoul Southern Immigration Office, which rejected the plaintiff’s February 2024 application to retain the citizenships of both countries.

South Korea’s Nationality Act states that a child of a citizen obtains citizenship at birth, and the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution grants citizenship to anyone born inside its territories. This means that someone born in the US to parents who are Korean citizens — as in case of the plaintiff — is granted dual citizenships at birth.

Dual citizens at birth are usually allowed to retain the nationality of South Korea and another country by pledging to the government not to exercise the rights of foreign citizenship before the age of 22, or within two years of completing their mandatary military service in the case of men. This is to prevent dual citizens from dodging duties mandated for South Koreans, such military service.

But the immigration office refused to allow dual citizenship to the plaintiff, saying that the plaintiff’s mother is thought to have lived in the US only for the explicit purpose of obtaining US citizenship for her child — sometimes referred to as “birth tourism.” The Nationality Act states that in cases where the parent is “deemed to have resided in a foreign country for the purpose of having the person acquire the nationality of the foreign country,” the child can retain his or her South Korean citizenship only after renouncing the other nationality.

The plaintiff’s mother went to the US in 2003 just before giving birth to the plaintiff, staying in the country for a month and a half. She went back to the US in 2011 and lived for four months since then.

“There are substantial grounds to believe (that the plaintiff’s mother) gave birth in a foreign country, with the intent to have the child gain the citizenship there,” the court said in its verdict.

The plaintiff denied that the mother’s stay in the US was for the purpose of ensuring her child had US citizenship, saying that she lived for four years in the country overall.

The Article 17-3 of the Enforcement Decree of the Nationality Act does state that a person who lived for two or more years in a country and gave birth there cannot be considered as having conducted birth tourism. But the court said this clause applies to parents who stayed for two consecutive years at the time of the birth of the child.

“The Nationality Act of this country had applied strict single nationality principle, and has only allowed dual citizenship on a limited number of cases since 2010. If the court interprets the article (Article 17-3) as the plaintiff claims, we cannot achieve the act’s goal of preventing birth tourism,” the court went on to say.

Source: Court denies dual citizenship application, citing ‘birth tourism’

Filed under Birth Tourism, Citizenship Tagged with ,

Staff warned immigration minister about setting ‘significant precedent’ with Ukraine visa program

2024/07/26 Leave a comment

Public service doing its job, providing “fearless advice” while loyally implementing questionable policy:

Federal immigration officials warned the government it risked undermining the temporary immigration system with the design of the emergency visa program for war-displaced Ukrainians, newly released court documents show.

Immigration Department staff raised the concern in a memo to Sean Fraser, immigration minister at the time, shortly after the program was announced.

The memos outline the design of the Ukraine visa program, which allowed an unlimited number of Ukrainians and their family members to come to Canada to wait out the war.

The policy also waived the requirement for fleeing Ukrainians to promise to leave when their visa expires, against the advice of department staff.

“Waiving the need for a client to establish temporary intent would set a significant precedent that is not recommended, given that it would undermine a foundational component of the (temporary resident) legal framework,” staff said in the memo to Fraser, which was signed March 14, 2022.

Staff cautioned that waiving the requirement — the foundation of the temporary resident program — would set an “expectation that it could be done for other populations, not only those affected by conflict.”

The documents were disclosed as part of a proposed lawsuit against the federal government by three Afghan Canadians, who allege Canada discriminated against Afghan refugees by treating them differently than it did Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion.

The lawsuit hasn’t yet been certified by the court.

“The government knew that what they were doing was unfair,” said Nicholas Pope, one of the lawyers representing the Afghan Canadians.

“That’s just what we’re arguing in this case. That it’s unfair, it’s discriminatory, and there’s not a good reason why protections shouldn’t be applied to people who aren’t from Europe.”

Warnings over ‘second class’ permanent residents

The lawsuit was filed by Canadians who served as language and culture advisers to the Canadian government and NATO during the war in Afghanistan, but haven’t been allowed to bring family members in Afghanistan to safety.

Canada has approved some 962,600 emergency visas for Ukrainians since the 2022 Russian invasion, which allow people fleeing the conflict to work and study while the war rages.

The program was generally well received in Canada, where people opened their homes to Ukrainians and donated clothes, furniture and other essentials to help them settle during their stay.

Roughly 298,000 actually made the trip to Canada, though it’s unclear how many have stayed and how many have since applied for permanent residency.

The documents also warn the design of the program could disadvantage Ukrainians by effectively creating “second class” permanent residents, without access to settlement supports or equivalent status under the law.

The government has argued the emergency program for Ukrainians can’t be compared to the program for Afghan refugees, because people from Afghanistan are unlikely to be able to return home.

In the memo, though, staff say the key distinction between temporary programs and permanent ones is the requirement that visa holders declare their intention to leave.

The department officials described the Ukraine emergency visa program as “exceptional in nature.”

“It underscores Canada’s unique relationship with Ukraine, the extensive diaspora and family links, as well as the unique nature of the conflict as a significant land invasion adjacent to EU countries with generous immigration measures,” the memo reads.

“However, it risks setting a significant precedent, one which may result in future pressures on the government to take similar action for other emergencies.”

Two full pages of legal considerations outlined by the department were blacked out in the documents provided to the court.

Fraser ultimately agreed with the department’s recommendation not to publish the policy publicly, given the “unprecedented and exceptional nature” of the approach.

Pope seized on that point Tuesday.

“Why would you not publish a policy if you’re proud of it, and you think that it’s fair, and you think that it’s just and you think that it’s Charter compliant?” he asked.

“I think they really understood the problematic nature of this.”

The offices of Fraser, now housing minister, and the current immigration minister, Marc Miller, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The government has emphasized that the Ukrainian program is intended to be temporary, and has encouraged those without family ties to Canada to apply for permanent residency through traditional means if they hope to stay.

Since Fraser announced the visa program, the government has faced accusations of unfairly limiting temporary refuge to people attempting to flee conflicts in Sudan and the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

In February, the Canadian Council for Refugees pointed out the disparity between the program for Ukrainians and the temporary refuge programs for Sudanese people.

“The crisis in Sudan is of catastrophic proportions,” the group wrote to Miller earlier this year.

“Given the scale of the crisis, the limit of 3,250 applications in the family-based humanitarian pathway is inadequate to the need. In contrast, Canada admitted an unlimited number of Ukrainians on temporary visas, and the pathway to permanent residence for Ukrainians is similarly without a cap.”

Source: Staff warned immigration minister about setting ‘significant precedent’ with Ukraine visa program

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Quebec’s latest Bill 21 ruling fuels debate on notwithstanding clause

2024/03/04 Leave a comment

Next likely stop Supreme Court of Canada, which would oblige the government and political parties to take less equivocal public stand, and reinforce the political and public divisionss:

….For groups that challenged the law, the ruling was a disappointment.

“I think it’s important for everybody that we take note of the devastating impact the notwithstanding clause has when it’s used by a government to violate the rights of marginalized communities in a particular location,” said Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, the executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

Mendelsohn Aviv said that while there were a number of reasons the clause was included by drafters of the Constitution — “it was never meant as anything other than a last resort. We don’t think it’s a legitimate use of the notwithstanding clause to use it to violate fundamental rights of minorities.”

But for supporters of the religious symbols ban, the decision was a victory for democracy.

“The Court of Appeal is explicitly saying that this is about democracy, that the notwithstanding clause is not something that violates rights, it’s not something that goes against democracy,” said Guillaume Rousseau, a lawyer for Mouvement laïque québécois, a group that intervened in the case to support the government. “It’s part of our democracy and it’s up to the elected officials to decide.”

Source: Quebec’s latest Bill 21 ruling fuels debate on notwithstanding clause

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Lanctôt | Une «belle victoire» pour la Loi sur la laïcité

2024/03/02 Leave a comment

A critical perspective:

Il s’agit, à n’en point douter, d’une grande victoire pour le gouvernement Legault dans le dossier de la Loi sur la laïcité de l’État. Jeudi, la Cour d’appel du Québec a confirmé la validité de la Loi, affirmant les conclusions de la Cour supérieure quant à l’application des dispositions de dérogation et en annulant l’exception qui avait été accordée par la Cour supérieure au système scolaire anglophone.

« La Cour vient confirmer le droit du Québec de prendre ses propres décisions, c’est vraiment une belle victoire pour la nation québécoise », déclarait le premier ministre, François Legault, en conférence de presse, quelques heures après la publication du jugement.

En 2021, le juge Marc-André Blanchard de la Cour supérieure du Québec avait déjà maintenu l’essentiel de la « loi 21 » en concluant à la validité de l’utilisation préventive de la disposition de dérogation aux droits fondamentaux garantis par les chartes canadienne et québécoise des droits et libertés.

Toutefois, le jugement formulait des commentaires inquiets quant à une utilisation aussi large de la disposition de dérogation. Le juge Blanchard notait que la loi 21 constituait le premier texte législatif dérogeant simultanément aux articles des deux chartes garantissant presque l’ensemble des droits et libertés dans la province. « Peu importe la perspective que l’on entretient face à la loi 21, notait-il, il faut souligner qu’il ne s’agit pas là d’une mince affaire. »

Sur le fond, il notait par ailleurs qu’il semblait « incontestable » que plusieurs dispositions de la loi violent non seulement les droits garantis par les chartes, mais aussi les droits découlant des instruments internationaux dont le Québec est signataire, notamment le Pacte international relatif aux droits civils et politiques, et le Pacte international relatif aux droits économiques, sociaux et culturels.

Là encore, dira-t-on, pas une mince affaire. Or, l’état du droit canadien, et c’est ce dont le gouvernement Legault et les défenseurs de la loi 21 se réjouissaient jeudi, le permet. Pour le dire vite, et reprenant l’analyse qu’ont fait tant la Cour supérieure que la Cour d’appel, en vertu de l’arrêt Ford de 1988, il suffit aux législatures des provinces d’inscrire les dérogations désirées dans la loi pour les soustraire au contrôle judiciaire.

Cet outil, quoique pertinent, est particulier au droit constitutionnel canadien : il tempère, d’une part, l’équilibre entre les provinces et le gouvernement fédéral. Il permet aussi de préserver l’autonomie de la législature face aux tribunaux.

Le Québec n’est pas la seule province à faire usage des dispositions de dérogation : le gouvernement de Doug Ford l’a fait en 2022, et plus récemment, la Saskatchewan aussi. Au Québec, en revanche, cet instrument, on le voit ces jours-ci, est chargé politiquement : déroger à cette vilaine Charte canadienne « qu’on n’a pas signée », ou encore à cette Charte québécoise qui, soi-disant, confère aux tribunaux un pouvoir démesuré, est devenu un marqueur politique clair, un appel du pied pour un certain électorat.

Ironiquement, la décision que le gouvernement Legault applaudit aujourd’hui témoigne que les tribunaux font preuve d’une grande déférence à l’égard de la législature. La décision de la Cour d’appel formule des remarques intéressantes à ce titre, en rappelant qu’il ne lui appartient pas de juger des motifs de suspendre les droits fondamentaux des citoyens ; et que le débat sur la portée des dispositions de dérogation a déjà eu lieu.

La Cour note ensuite qu’il revient aux citoyens, à la société civile, de décider si cette façon de faire du législateur lui convient. Votez en conséquence, dit-on en gros, cela n’est pas l’affaire des tribunaux.

Je crois qu’il s’agit en effet de la question fondamentale qu’il faut se poser en tant que citoyen.

Si les dispositions de dérogation agissent comme un contre-pouvoir face à Ottawa, face au contrôle judiciaire des lois en général, les droits fondamentaux, entre les mains des citoyens, constituent aussi un contre-pouvoir. On parle de préserver l’autonomie du législateur face aux tribunaux, mais qu’en est-il de protéger les citoyens face aux dérives législatives ?

L’équilibre est-il atteint ici, alors que l’on suspend la quasi-totalité des droits garantis par la Charte québécoise, pour une seule loi visant une affirmation nationale abstraite plus qu’elle ne répond à un enjeu réel ?

Dans ce dossier, on parle souvent de la nécessité de tempérer les droits individuels au profit des droits collectifs. Sauf que les droits collectifs sont toujours conditionnés par la possibilité d’exercer les droits individuels. Ces droits collectifs ne s’exercent pas dans l’abstrait, ils sont la somme des droits et des conditions d’existence que l’on garantit aux citoyens. Cela étant dit, est-on à l’aise avec l’érosion manifeste des droits des minorités religieuses provoquée ici ?

La réponse, on le comprend, est oui — en témoigne l’appui, auprès d’une certaine génération du moins, à la loi 21.

Je pense au contraire que nous nous tirons dans le pied et que nous fragilisons le tissu social en nous comportant de manière aussi ouvertement méprisante à l’égard des droits des minorités — pas juste religieuse, d’ailleurs. Construire, affirmer une identité collective « contre » quelque chose n’a jamais mené à de belles choses.

Le feuilleton de la « laïcité » (insistons sur les guillemets) a déjà laissé des cicatrices profondes dans la société québécoise, parce que ce « débat » a été mené sans égard à son effet stigmatisant sur l’ensemble des minorités. On prétend que l’affirmation du « nous » de la majorité y a gagné au change, alors au diable les dégâts collatéraux. Il me semble au contraire que les divisions n’ont jamais été aussi profondes, de toutes parts.

Aurélie Lanctôt, Chroniqueuse spécialisée dans les enjeux de justice environnementale, l’autrice est doctorante en droit à l’Université McGill.

Source: Chronique | Une «belle victoire» pour la Loi sur la laïcité

Filed under Interculturalisme, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Colby Cosh: Ontario math case is mirror-image racism disguised as racial sensitivity

2023/09/18 Leave a comment

Of note:

The Canadian Constitution Foundation announced in a press release on Thursday that it has been granted intervenor status in an appeal, approved a year ago but not yet scheduled, that will concern Ontario’s famous racist math test for teacher candidates. In 2018, as you might recall, the Ontario government, concerned about sluggish student math performance, introduced a new math proficiency test (MPT) that teachers would have to pass before being admitted to the profession.

The test was based on the kinds of questions that students in grades 3, 6 and 9 would themselves be expected to answer in a classroom, and it was checked closely for explicit indications of racial bias and sensitivity. Nevertheless, in both trials of the MPT and the first year it was given officially (2021), some groups of test-takers — notably candidates self-described as being of African, Caribbean and Indigenous descent — didn’t score quite as well as the white ones.

Yes, friends, it’s one of those “disparate impact” issues that is constantly raising the political temperature in the United States, but that we haven’t yet fought about much here. This is the struggle that has a chance of spreading the American race-panic infection when the Ontario Court of Appeal and perhaps the Supreme Court get around to hashing it out.

In late 2021, a hastily assembled “Teacher Candidates’ Council” brought an application for judicial review of the MPT on the grounds that it violated Section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which forbids the state from racial discrimination. A panel of the Divisional Court, wielding novel Supreme Court doctrine on “disparate impact” cases, ruled that the MPT was discriminatory and struck down the statutory requirement for teachers to pass it.

The Divisional Court’s ruling is a truly dismal, laborious document: it exhibits a logic that the legal commentator Leonid Sirota has described as “Bonkerstown.” Section 15 says that the law cannot engage in “discrimination based on race,” and nothing in or about the test does that — except, well, that it’s a test. The court comments in the decision, as a matter of uncontested and universally recognized fact, that “Black and Latinx teacher candidates are much more likely to fail standardized teacher tests than their White peers,” and that standardized tests, perhaps by their very nature, “are biased against almost all vulnerable classes of potential teachers other than women.

Does this mean that any kind of state-administered proficiency test yielding a “disparate impact” is thereby outlawed? The ruling “disparate impact” case, Fraser v. Canada, dates only from the fall of 2020, and was written by, you guessed it, the now-retired Justice Rosalie Abella. Abella’s disparate impact doctrine, summarized helpfully at paragraph 57 of the Divisional Court ruling, says that the legislature’s intentions in writing a law are irrelevant, and that there is no need for a court to demonstrate or show how a law causes a disparate impact on racial groups. If there is any difference at all in the between-group outcomes of a law, Sec. 15 is activated.

This essentially throws disparate-impact questions in the hands of the classic Oakes test. In a given case, is there a sufficiently urgent and compelling reason for Sec. 15 to be violated? The Divisional Court agreed that the MPT was a way of addressing a “pressing and substantial objective” — improving the dismal math education in Ontario. The government’s choice to adopt the test was proportionate and rational: there is some evidence that teachers who do better on math tests themselves get better results from students. This takes us to the question of “minimal impairment,” which is the hurdle at which the MPT fell.

The Divisional Court panel acknowledged that high deference to lawmakers is required when it comes to “complex social problem(s) with many potential solutions.” As often happens, this high-flown language was a warning sign that the court wasn’t going to defer at all. The panel acknowledged that the government did what it could to mitigate the disparate effect of the test, screening it for biases and letting teacher candidates take it as often as they needed to. But the government did have alternatives to imposing the MPT at the end of teacher education. It could have added, and did consider adding, more math requirements and math courses to bachelor of education programs themselves.

The government was reluctant to do this, and preferred to have an MPT, because altering bachelor of education requirements would involve the province poking its nose into higher education and treading on the independence of universities. Moreover, there’s no real indication that this approach would necessarily be any better for education students who are bad at math exams. But simply because the MPT had been tried, and shown to yield disparate outcomes, the existence of a hypothetical alternative was enough to engage the “minimal impairment” part of the Oakes analysis in the eyes of the Divisional Court judges.

In short, you can’t say you minimally impaired the rights of racial minorities if there was anything else you could have done to uphold a training standard or a proficiency requirement. Nobody needs me to hector them about the grotesque nature of this chain of reasoning — which involves deciding that there are groups inherently bound not to cut the mustard on tests of their capability, and reading the Charter of Rights in a way that protects them from those tests. Most of you will see this as mirror-image racism disguised as racial sensitivity, and that’s just what it is.

Source: Colby Cosh: Ontario math case is mirror-image racism disguised as racial sensitivity

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‘Penalized for having been born abroad’: Foreign-born Canadians take government to court over second-generation cut-off rule

2023/04/21 Leave a comment

Will see what the court decides:

Should foreign-born Canadians who travel and give birth overseas automatically forfeit their right to pass on citizenship by descent?

That’s the question before the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, which has been asked to decide if Canada is violating the charter by restricting the passing of citizenship by descent to the first generation born abroad only.

The lawsuit was brought by 23 individuals from seven families that have been negatively affected by the loss of citizenship as a result of the so-called second generation cut-off rule introduced by former prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in 2009.

The multi-generational litigants claim the law discriminates against their families based on their place of birth, violates their mobility and liberty rights, and disproportionately puts women at a disadvantage when they have to give birth outside of Canada due to circumstances beyond their control.

The government argues that there’s no charter right to citizenship and Canada has never prevented any of the litigants from exiting or returning to the country, arguing that they made the “personal choices” to pursue international employment opportunities and have children abroad.

However, the families’ lawyers argued that government’s position oversimplifies the “complicated” reality of the many “moving parts” of those choices, such as access to health care, cost of health care, risks of travel, loss of job and income and jeopardy to career advancement.

“All of them are unable to pass on citizenship due to the circumstances of their birth. Their parents were Canadian citizens who went abroad temporarily for work or travel … That’s a circumstance beyond the control of the members of the first generation born abroad,” co-counsel Ira Parghi told Justice Jasmine Akbarali on Wednesday.

“Although they didn’t choose to be born abroad, they are nonetheless now being penalized for having been born abroad.”

The Canadian Citizenship Act has gone through numerous amendments since it came into effect in 1947. For years, it allowed Canadian parents to pass citizenship to their children born outside of Canada onto indefinite generations as long as the foreign-born descendants registered with the government by a certain age.

In 2009, the Harper government enacted and imposed a second generation cut-off for Canadians born abroad after Ottawa’s massive effort to evacuate 15,000 Lebanese Canadians stranded in Beirut during a month-long war between Israel and Lebanon in 2006.

Then immigration minister Diane Finley said the change was meant to discourage “Canadians of convenience” by ensuring citizens have a real connection to this country and not selling the Canadian citizenship short.

“Minister Finley justified the second generation cut-off by invoking concerns about Canadians of convenience, who would never set foot in Canada, had no real connection to Canada and simply sought citizenship to preserve the option of living here,” said Sujit Choudhry, co-counsel for the “lost Canadians.”

“The applicants are not Canadians of convenience. They returned as small children. They spent their formative years here. They are Canadian. Canada is their home.”

While Canadians born in Canada and naturalized Canadians could pass their citizenship to their children born abroad, Choudhry said Canadians born abroad by descent could not similarly do so.

“It’s an entirely arbitrary distinction and it’s the epitome of discrimination,” he contended.

Currently, one option for lost Canadians is to ask the immigration minister for a discretionary grant of citizenship “in exceptional cases” where a person is stateless or faces “special and unusual hardship” or proven to be “an exceptional value” to Canada.

Alternatively, Canadian parents can sponsor their foreign-born children to the country through family reunification if they are underage.

The families lawyers said both pathways are tortuous and unprincipled with little transparency, and decisions are rendered at the whim of a government bureaucrat.

Victoria Maruyama, who was born in Hong Kong and came to Canada in 1980 when she was one-year-old, has had an uphill battle trying to secure Canadian citizenship for her two children. They were both born in Japan, where she met her Japanese husband, an Air Force pilot, while she was teaching English there in 2002.

In 2017, she brought her children to Canada on visitors’ visas with the intent to raise them in her homeland. She made a plea to the immigration minister for Canadian citizenship for her kids’ while fighting to get them into public school and access to health care.

She subsequently applied for a discretionary citizenship grant by the minister and sponsored her young family for permanent residence.

“This concept of choice is very problematic when used in such a simple way,” Parghi told court.

Born in Libya, Patrick Chandler grew up in Mississauga and studied at the University of Toronto before teaching English in China, where he met his wife, Fiona. Both his children were born in Beijing.

In 2017, Chandler returned to Canada to start his family sponsorship but left his family behind because they wouldn’t be eligible for provincial health insurance or able to attend public schools.

“It is true that there is an alternative pathway which was to get permanent residency first and then citizenship. It is true that’s what the Chandler family did,” Parghi said. “But in order to get that permanent residency, they had to endure the yearlong separation whose effects were so devastating.”

The hearing resumes Thursday with arguments from the government.

Source: ‘Penalized for having been born abroad’: Foreign-born Canadians take government to court over second-generation cut-off rule

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Record-breaking number of immigration cases went through Federal Court in 2022

2023/03/18 Leave a comment

Result of processing times and backlogs, gumming up the system further:

Canada’s Federal Court saw more new immigration proceedings in 2022 than any of the past 30 years, which some lawyers say is a sign of an overburdened system.

Recent statistics posted to the court’s website show more than 70 per cent of its cases were tied to immigration and refugees as of late 2022.

In total, the court saw 13,487 new immigration proceedings in 2022, up from 9,761 in 2021 and 6,424 in 2020, according to the office of Chief Justice Paul Crampton.

Source: Record-breaking number of immigration cases went through Federal Court in 2022

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Canadian ISIL suspect with ties to Chatham could settle in Ottawa after repatriation

2023/01/27 Leave a comment

Sigh… An overly sympathetic treatment of an apparent ISIL member, UK born and raised, whose UK citizenship revocation allowed the UK government to “offload” him to Canada, despite his having never lived here. While I understand the desire of parents to do everything for their son, government should appeal this particular case (a Canadian is a Canadian need not necessarily be deemed a Canadian in cases such as this):

An activist working with the family of an alleged terrorist connected to Chatham and held for the past five years in Syria says Jack Letts could wind up living in Ottawa with his mother if he’s brought back to Canada.

Letts, a former British national nicknamed “Jihadi Jack” by the media there, is one of four Canadian men a court ruled last week must be repatriated to Canada. Stripped of his U.K. citizenship by the British government for alleged ties to ISIL, the Oxford-born Letts still retains a Canadian citizenship through his father, who is originally from the Chatham-Kent region but now lives in England.
Matthew Behrens, an advocate with the group Stop Canadian Involvement In Torture, which has been working with the Letts family on their repatriation efforts, said the “hope is that he will join his mom in Ottawa”He said Letts’ mother, Sally Lane, moved to the nation’s capital a few years ago after her son was stripped of his British citizenship. Behrens said Lane decided to move to Ottawa to maintain pressure on the Canadian government to bring her son home “because Jack is a Canadian citizen who has a right to return here.”

Behrens said supporters hope Letts and the other three men will be repatriated by Feb. 15, the second anniversary of the Global Declaration Against Arbitrary Detention. He added that Canadian-authored declaration was signed into existence “ostensibly to bring home the two Michaels” – Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, who were detained in China for nearly three years for questionable reasons.
The Canadian government, Behrens said, “completely ignored” those principles when dealing with the four men imprisoned by Kurdish forces in northeast Syria.Behrens, who was in the courtroom when Justice Henry Brown ruled the four male prisoners must be repatriated, said the judge’s decision required the detainees to be brought back as soon as reasonably possible.

“The judge said that in the context of reminding the government that the conditions of the women and children were bad enough, but that the conditions of the men are worse. He called them dire,” the activist said.Brown’s decision was the result of a court action launched in 2021 by the Letts family and the family members of the other Canadians detained in this Kurdish prison. Lawyers struck an agreement on Jan. 19 for the federal government to retrieve six women and 13 children held in captivity, but not the four men, none of whom were named, except for Letts.

Then on Jan. 20, Brown ruled the four men must also be returned to Canada, citing the mobility rights section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which says every citizen “has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada.”

Brown noted in his ruling the men were in custody because the Kurds suspected they were part of ISIL. The judge, though, said federal government lawyers did not allege in court that “any of the (Canadians) engaged in or assisted in terrorist activities.”

“Canadians are entitled to have political opinions, no matter how abhorrent they may be to other Canadians,” the judge wrote in his decision. He said the line is crossed when they actually commit crimes, but “there is no evidence to that effect before this court.”

Source: Canadian ISIL suspect with ties to Chatham could settle in Ottawa after repatriation

Filed under Citizenship, Radicalization Tagged with , , ,

Iranian accused of sanction-dodging seeks expedited Canadian citizenship 

2022/12/21 Leave a comment

Methink he does protest too much:

A Toronto man accused by Canada’s intelligence service of helping Iran dodge international sanctions has filed a court case against the government for not granting him citizenship.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has alleged Alireza Onghaei took part in “foreign influenced activities … that are detrimental to the interests of Canada and are clandestine or deceptive.”

But Onghaei, 46, an Iranian citizen who owns a house in Vaughan, Ont., claimed in an application to the Federal Court that his quest to become a Canadian citizen had faced “unreasonable” delays.

In the case, filed in Montreal on Nov. 16, Onghaei asked the court to order the government “to render a decision with regards to his citizenship application.”

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada would not comment.

Onghaei’s lawyer also declined to comment. But reached by phone, Onghaei called the allegations against him “f—king bulls—t.”

He denied admitting to CSIS he had moved millions into Canada for the Iranian regime, and accused the Canadian government of fabricating a case against him to show it was cracking down against Iran.

The government did so to “try to get like more votes from the immigrants,” he said. He said the fact he had initiated the case against the government showed he was innocent.

“It’s logic,” he said.

This is the fifth court case Onghaei has filed against Canada since he arrived in the country as an investor immigrant in 2008 and opened a series of currency exchange businesses in Ontario and B.C.

Already a citizen of both Iran and the Caribbean island nation Saint Kitts and Nevis, he was refused Canadian citizenship in 2018 but appealed.

The CSIS security screening branch interviewed Onghaei in 2019 and wrote in its report that he had admitted to “assisting the government of Iran in the clandestine wiring of monies into Canada.”

According to the report, Onghaei “admitted to having owned a private exchange company that would transfer funds from Bank Saderat and other Iranian financial actors into Canada.”

Bank Saderat is an Iranian state bank sanctioned by Canada and used to “channel funds to terrorist organizations,” CSIS wrote in the report, which was filed in court.

CSIS estimated he had moved “in the millions.”

“For additional clarity, Mr. Onghaei stated that he knows the process of circumventing economic sanctions is clearly illegal. Yet, Mr. Onghaei admitted to having conducted such activities for at least three years,” CSIS wrote.

“On a separate note, Mr. Onghaei stated that if he were to profit from such a relationship, he would ‘gladly’ work for a foreign intelligence service, notably one from Iran,” according to the report.

Onghaei has not been charged over the allegations.

“They have nothing, man,” he said.

He said CSIS would not allow him to record his two-day security screening interview “because they knew they want to lie to the public, they knew they want to report by the bulls—t.”

“Never I did admit, never I did work with the Iranian f—king government.”

He said the government had delayed his citizenship application for nine years. “I have a right to file a court case against them again, that’s all.”

An international organization that has been attempting to identify members and associates of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in Canada and the United States said more than half of those uncovered to date had already acquired citizenship.

“The current legal regime in Canada does not address these sorts of cases at all, focusing on a limited number of sanctions and targeted individuals without status in Canada (preventing them from entry or preventing their citizenship),” said Ram Joubin.

“It does not address the security risk that such individuals pose either, due to their past association with the dictatorship in Iran and its various sub-branches,” said Joubin, a B.C. lawyer involved in the group Stop IRGC.

Source: Iranian accused of sanction-dodging seeks expedited Canadian …

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