Border bill would leave dissidents who visited Canada in the past at risk: experts

2025/08/20 Leave a comment

Valid concern but how to have an exception from the general rule with a definition and process that separates significant dissidents from some who make claim but have less legitimate fears:

Dissidents, human-rights activists and journalists being persecuted by foreign regimes could find themselves unable to get asylum hearings in Canada under planned immigration changes, refugee experts warn. 

They are calling on the federal government to create an exception in Bill C-2, the Strong Borders bill, so dissidents can find safe haven here. 

As it is currently worded, the bill would exclude dissidents and others from hearings at the Immigration and Refugee Board if they came to Canada more than a year before their claim.

Many – including political opponents of authoritarian regimes – may have visited Canada to attend meetings, speak at summits or give lectures, the experts warn. 

Bill C-2, which is going through its parliamentary stages, aims to tighten up immigration rules and is likely to cut the total number of asylum claims. It would put people who have been in Canada for more than a year on a fast track to deportation. 

The bill specifies that the one-year period “begins on the day after the day of their first entry.” 

Lawyers said a “first entry” would include any previous visit to Canada, including a holiday here. 

“Unlike the U.S. approach, where the one-year rule generally applies based on the most recent entry and includes exceptions, the Canadian version is broader and more rigid,” immigration lawyer Warda Shazadi Meighen of Toronto law firm Landings LLP said in an e-mail.

“This has troubling implications. It would apply to individuals who came to Canada years ago for reasons entirely unrelated to their current need for protection – as children on holiday, students, guest speakers or attendees at international conferences. 

“These are often the same people – foreign dissidents, human rights advocates, journalists and LGBTQ+ individuals – who later flee genuine and escalating persecution from authoritarian regimes. Their prior, often innocent, engagement with Canada could now preclude them from seeking asylum here.”

Ms. Shazadi Meighen urged the government to create “a clear carve-out for dissidents and others fleeing political violence or state persecution, or at minimum a discretionary mechanism with procedural safeguards for those who fall outside the one-year window due to past presence but now face genuine risk.” 

Gauri Sreenivasan, co-executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, called the one-year bar being proposed in Bill C-2 “a dangerous step that actually undermines safety for many in Canada.”

“For example, those that travelled to Canada as children, or someone that came to Canada previously as a renowned journalist, academic or human-rights defender to share their expertise and is later under threat in their country for this very reason could be arbitrarily denied access to safety due to their earlier visit; it defies logic,” she said. “There should be no time limit on the right to seek protection in or at our borders.”

Fen Osler Hampson, president of the World Refugee and Migration Council, said the wording of the bill’s clauses on asylum could have far-reaching, unintended consequences.

“In legislative drafting, every word and comma counts and the government should scrutinize every word, sentence and paragraph in new legislation carefully, not just in terms of their intended consequence and professed objectives, but also their potentially unintended consequences, which, in this particular instance, are profound and unintentionally discriminatory,” Mr. Osler Hampson, who is also professor of international affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, said in an e-mail. 

Source: Border bill would leave dissidents who visited Canada in the past at risk: experts

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Immigration rules that jeopardized Russian activist’s citizenship bid need fixing, experts say – CBC.ca

2024/01/15 Leave a comment

Would be nice to know if this is an isolated case or part of a broader pattern. Could likely be addressed through an operational bulletin:

….While her supporters applauded the eventual outcome, experts and advocates — including a Russian opposition politician convicted under the same law — say Canada must clarify its immigration rules to avoid making the same mistake again.

“This is a shocking case. It’s a clear miscarriage of justice,” said Matthew Light, and associate professor of criminology and European studies at the University of Toronto, in an interview before Miller’s intervention.

“I can only assume it arose through a very basic misunderstanding of the nature of the Russian political system and the law in question, which is … a blatant attempt to silence opposition to the war in Ukraine.”

Light said the law has had a “dramatic” effect in Russia, where thousands have been arrested for allegedly discrediting the “special military operation” in Ukraine.

Now, Light said, the Kremlin appears to be taking aim at Russians who have fled.

“I think the fact that the sentence that was handed down in this [case] was so extreme indicates that the Russian government sees it as important to them to send a message to Russian citizens abroad that they can be found and that they can be in trouble with their [adopted country’s] government if they speak out against the war.”

Light believes the intent of the Russian law is “perfectly clear” and said it’s astounding that Canadian immigration officials failed to recognize it for what it is.

“The part about this case that’s so unbelievable is that anybody in the Canadian government would believe that this is a proper law,” he said, likening it to a Canadian citizen being imprisoned for criticizing the war in Afghanistan.

“It’s really that simple. This is somebody who’s criticizing a policy of their government, in this case the invasion of Ukraine, and being punished for that.”

Wesley Wark, senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and an expert on national security and intelligence issues, called Kartasheva’s case extraordinary for its “sheer absurdity.”

He was also interviewed before the minister’s intervention.

“It’s really a kind of Kafkaesque situation that this person has been thrust in,” said Wark, who attempted to intervene with senior government officials on Kartasheva’s behalf and said her predicament reminded him of another case in which he was involved.

He said Russia might even seize upon the gaffe for its own propaganda purposes.

“In a broader perspective, it does bring … the conduct of the Canadian government into disrepute,” Wark said. “On every level — in terms of international relations, in terms of application of the law, in terms of what I call bureaucratic turpitude, reputation impact on the individual in question — it’s just so wrong.”

Wark suspects Kartasheva’s application became bogged down on the desk of a junior official who was operating strictly by the book, but said that doesn’t make the government’s handling of it any less egregious.

“The very idea that we would even for a moment contemplate looking for an equivalent to a Russian criminal sanction that is politically motivated and designed to stamp out dissent … just strikes me as absurd,” he said.

Source: Immigration rules that jeopardized Russian activist’s citizenship bid need fixing, experts say – CBC.ca

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Canada backtracks on citizenship review for Russian antiwar activist

2024/01/11 Leave a comment

Expected and good quick correction (following media coverage). Hopefully others aren’t in similar situations:

A Russian antiwar activist living in Ottawa has been granted Canadian citizenship after all, despite a conviction in Russia that threatened to disqualify her.

Maria Kartasheva, 30, has lived in Ottawa since 2019.

She was convicted under a Russian law passed shortly after the full-scale invasion in of Ukraine in February 2022. The law prohibits “public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”

….

On Tuesday afternoon, Canadian Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Marc Miller said in a social media post that Kartasheva “will not face deportation and has been invited to become a Canadian citizen.”

“Canada’s citizenship eligibility rules are designed to catch criminals, not to suppress or punish legitimate political dissent,” wrote a post from his account on X.

Source: Canada backtracks on citizenship review for Russian antiwar activist

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Russian antiwar activist could lose Canadian citizenship bid over conviction abroad – CBC.ca

2024/01/06 Leave a comment

Appears to be a case of operational staff ignoring or not considering the context and expect that CBC coverage will provoke a needed rethink. Makes no sense and would be curious to know whether this is an isolated instance or being applied more broadly to similar cases.

From a process point of view, Kartasheva flagged this conviction in writing as part of her application and thus no misrepresentation. Why IRCC missed this, only to notice at the ceremony, reflects sloppiness at best. Should have been addressed before rather than this humiliating treatment of Kartasheva and, more broadly, of IRCC’s processing:

A critic of the Kremlin could be barred from obtaining Canadian citizenship because she has to prove to immigration officials here that it isn’t a crime in Canada to criticize the Russian army.

Maria Kartasheva, who has lived in Ottawa since 2019, has been convicted under a Russian law passed shortly after the invasion of Ukraine which bars “public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”

Kartasheva says she was surprised Russian prosecutors pursued her over two blog posts she wrote while living in Ontario.

But what was most jawdropping for the 30-year-old was when a Canadian officiant motioned for her to step aside in the middle of her citizenship ceremony last spring, just moments before she was supposed to swear her allegiance to the Crown.

“I felt betrayed because I was hoping I was safe here in Canada,” said Kartasheva, who’s a tech worker in the national capital.

Under Canadian immigration rules, if an applicant is charged with a crime in another country that could be indictable under Canada’s Criminal Code, their application can be revoked or refused. …

Source: Russian antiwar activist could lose Canadian citizenship bid over conviction abroad – CBC.ca

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New report details how autocrats use the internet to harass and suppress activists in Canada

2022/03/03 Leave a comment

Thousands of miles away from her homeland in Syria, she organized protests and ran social media pages in Canada in support of opposition forces fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Then anonymous complaints started rolling in and prompted Facebook to shut down her group page. Trolls left “nasty and dirty” comments on social media and created fake profiles with her photos, she said, while a Gmail administrator alerted her that “a state sponsor” was trying to hack her account.

“The Assad regime was functioning through this network of thugs that they call Shabeeha. Inside of Syria, those thugs would be physically beating up people and terrorizing them,” said the 42-year-old Toronto woman.

“Then they were also very much online, so they terrorized people online as well.”

As diaspora communities are increasingly relying on social media and other online platforms to pursue advocacy work, authoritarian states are trying to exert their will over overseas dissidents through what’s dubbed “digital transnational repression,” said a new study released Tuesday.

“States that engage in transnational repression use a variety of methods to silence, persecute, control, coerce, or otherwise intimidate their nationals abroad into refraining from transnational political or social activities that may undermine or threaten the state and power within its border,” said the report by the Citizen Lab at University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

“Thus, nationals of these states who reside abroad are still limited in how they can exercise ‘their rights, liberties, and voice’ and remain subject to state authoritarianism even after leaving their country of origin.”

Being a country of immigrants — particularly refugees seeking protection from persecution — Canada is vulnerable to this kind of digital attacks, amid the advancement of surveillance technology and rising authoritarianism around the globe, said the report’s authors.

“There is this misassumption that once people arrive in Canada from authoritarian countries, they are safe. We need to redefine what safety is,” said Noura Al-Jizawi, one of the report’s co-authors.

“This is not only affecting the day-to-day life of these people, but it’s also affecting the civic rights, their freedom of speech or their freedom of assembly of an entire community that’s beyond the individuals who are being targeted.”

A team of researchers interviewed 18 individuals, all of whom resided in Canada and had moved or fled to Canada from 11 different places, including Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Tibet, Hong Kong, China, Rwanda, Iran, Afghanistan, East Turkestan, and Balochistan.

The participants shared their experiences of being intimidated for the advocacy work they conducted in Canada, as well as the impacts of such threats — allegedly from these foreign states and their supporters — on their well-being and the diaspora communities they come from.

“Their main concern besides their privacy and the privacy of their family is the friends and colleagues back home. If the government targets their devices digitally, they would reveal the underground and hidden network of activists,” said Al-Jizawi.

“Many of them mention that they try to avoid the communities from their country of origin because they can’t feel safe connecting with these people.”

Many of the participants in the study said they have reached out for assistance to authorities such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service but were disappointed.

“The responses were generally like, we can’t help you or this isn’t a crime and there’s nothing actionable here. In one case, they suggested to the person to hire a private detective,” noted Siena Anstis, another co-author of the study.

“Law enforcement is probably not that well equipped or trained to understand the broader context within which this is happening. The way that they handle these cases is quite dismissive.”

The anonymous Syrian-Canadian political activist who participated in the study said victims of transnational repression will stop reporting to Canadian officials if nothing comes out of their complaints.

“Every day we’re becoming more and more digital, which makes us more vulnerable to digital attacks and digital privacy issues. I hope our government will start thinking about how to protect us from this emerging threat that we never had to worry about before,” said the woman, who came here from Aleppo as a 7-year-old and has stopped her political activities to free Syria.

“If someone like me who is extremely outspoken and very difficult to stifle felt a little bit overwhelmed by all of it, you can imagine other people who recently came from Syria and still have a lot of ties there. I know a lot of people that will not open their mouth publicly because they’re scared what will happen.”

The report urges Ottawa to create a dedicated government agency to support victims and conduct research to better understand the scale and impact of these activities on the exercise of Canadian human rights. It also recommends establishing federal policies for the sale of surveillance technologies to authoritarian states and for guiding how social media platforms can better protect victims from digital attacks.

“It might seem at this stage it’s only happening to some communities in Canada and it doesn’t matter,” said Anstis. “But collectively it’s our human rights that are being eroded. It’s our capacity to engage in, affirm and protect against human rights and democracy. That space for dialogue is really reducing.”

Source: New report details how autocrats use the internet to harass and suppress activists in Canada

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Young Hong Kong dissidents were told Canada welcomed them. Why can’t they get visas?

2022/02/12 Leave a comment

Of note:

It wasn’t an inherently risky choice — he just heeded calls on social media to attend a public gathering to mark a student’s death at the height of anti-government protests. 

However, it was a decision that may have wrecked his future in Canada.

Clad in all black, he ventured out to join the event but as soon as he and four friends got off the bus in Hong Kong’s Central District, police stopped them. Authorities found a laser pointer in his backpack and charged him in 2019 with possession of a weapon with the intent to assault.

After serving seven months in a youth rehab centre in Lantau Island, the 20-year-old was released last June and planned to start his undergraduate study in Toronto, where he finished high school as an international student.

However, more than five months since he applied for a student visa and submitted thousands of pages of translated legal documents, the Hong Konger is still waiting for a decision from the Canadian visa post in the former British colony, now part of China.

Pro-democracy advocates in Canada say they have started to see visa-seekers from Hong Kong whose applications — a first step to access asylum in this country — have been stalled or refused, despite Ottawa’s public commitment to ease their passage here in light of the alarming human-rights situation there.

“These youngsters have been charged and imprisoned for wearing a mask or carrying laser pointers during demonstrations … arrested and convicted with trumped-up charges. To us, they’re political prisoners,” said Winnie Ng, chair of the Toronto Association for Democracy in China.

“The Canadian government had stated quite clearly that protest is a right and that convictions of these offences will not be a ground for inadmissibility to Canada.”

In 2020, after a new national security law took effect in Hong Kong, Ottawa announced a string of new initiatives to welcome students and youth to “quickly” come to Canada on work and study permits as well as introduced new pathways for them to stay here permanently.

Marco Mendicino, then Canada’s immigration minister, expressed deep concerns about the imposition of the new law in Hong Kong, which critics say has reduced judicial autonomy and restricted freedoms for dissent. 

“Taking part in peaceful protests is not considered an offence in Canada. As such, arrests or convictions outside of Canada for taking part in peaceful protests are not grounds for inadmissibility to Canada,” Mendicino told a parliamentary committee meeting then.

“No one will be disqualified from making a legitimate asylum claim in Canada by virtue alone of having been charged under the new national security law, and neither will they be hindered in any way from availing themselves under any other immigration route.”SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Calling himself a supporter for “peace, reason and non-violence,” the young man who was found guilty of possession of a weapon by carrying the laser pen said he is disappointed that Canada hasn’t followed through its commitment.

“We have translated all the legal documents into English and explained to the visa officers the circumstances of the arrest and conviction,” said the man, who studied for three years in high school in Toronto and returned to Hong Kong for the summer in 2019.

“We were told to bring a torch light or laser point to commemorate the death of a protester who died two days earlier. And police called the laser pointer a weapon. But there was no confrontation or violence.”

According to the immigration department, at least 10 Hong Kong residents have been refused a visa on criminal grounds to date under the special measures — but many have successfully taken advantage of those initiatives for a shot to settle in Canada.

By the end of last year, 668 Hong Kong nationals who have studied or worked in Canada had been granted permanent residence, 7,950 others issued a three-year open work permits and 7,786 visitors, students and work-permit holders had their temporary status extended.

However, it’s the applications that are stalled or refused on “protest-related” criminality that advocates are concerned about.

Data collected by Toronto Association for Democracy in China showed Hong Kong police charged 2,605 people in the 2019 pro-democracy protest movement. The top charges were rioting, conspiracy with the intent to cause riot, face covering, unlawful assembly and possession of offensive weapons and items with the intent to destroy or damage property.

One of those arrested and convicted of facial covering was Ken, a 23-year-old university graduate, who took part in a protest against police violence in late 2019. He was acquitted of one count of rioting but was sentenced to a two-month jail term for violating the anti-mask law.

He said he wore the gas mask for self-protection because police had previously used tear gas and pepper spray on protesters. As a result of the prosecution, he said he and his family became targets of cyberbullying and he was shunned by potential employers for his association with the political movement.

“I didn’t see a future for myself in Hong Kong. We were harassed online and I didn’t feel safe there. I just wanted to start a new chapter in life,” said Ken, who fled Hong Kong to an undisclosed country after his application to travel to Canada was recently refused.

“How can you seek political asylum in Canada if you can’t even get into the country? I understand Canadian officials need to feel safe about someone coming to their country and they do need to screen out criminals. I’m just disappointed that they don’t take a more lenient, humanitarian approach in handling our cases.”

Toronto immigration lawyer Barbara Jackman said immigration officials can deem someone criminally inadmissible if they assess and find Canadian equivalency of the offences. However, an officer also has the discretion to look to the facts behind the case.

“It all depends on how they’re going to look at them in terms of whether China has overreacted and is actually prosecuting lawful dissent and protest,” said Jackman, who is involved in both the young Hong Kongers’ cases.

“The Canadian government has announced all these programs for Hong Kong residents. They are all parts of the news releases and bulletins that they come up with. It’s an expression of the government’s views on the matter. Visa officers are supposed to take it into account.”

The immigration department could not comment on the two specific cases but said inadmissibility decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.

“Security screening and the overall complexity of a case are some factors that can result in higher processing times. Other factors include delays associated with requests for additional information from the applicant, and how easily information can be verified and whether the application is complete,” said department spokesperson Jeffrey MacDonald.

Source: Young Hong Kong dissidents were told Canada welcomed them. Why can’t they get visas?

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