Despicable Canadian Statists: Mother and children who fled violent abuser in France must now face new refugee hearing

OTTAWA — Omaima Makdesi and her three children fled to Canada in 2008 to escape a violently abusive husband who regularly beat and threatened to kill them. Last year, the Immigration and Refugee Board granted them protection as refugees.

It’s a common enough story. Desperate women regularly turn to Canada when authorities in their own countries are unable or unwilling to protect them.

The twist is that Makdesi and her children were living on the island of Martinique, a territory of France, and are dual citizens of France and Syria. While Syria is seen as a place where domestic abuse goes unpunished, few would say the same of France.

That places Makdesi’s family in the category of refugee claimants who’d be less likely to succeed under reforms unveiled last week by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.

Under the proposed changes, refugee claimants from countries designated safe by the minister — including France and most other EU countries — will be processed within 45 days, severely curtailing their time to prepare their cases. And if their claims are rejected, they’ll be swiftly deported, even if they apply for judicial review by the Federal Court of Canada.

Makdesi’s case also highlights the disconnect between the way the law handles refugees and the real-life perils many face. As the recent Shafia trial graphically demonstrated, even a democratic state can’t always protect vulnerable women and children from family members bent on mayhem.

In his decision, Gilles Guénette, the Ottawa-based IRB member who approved Makdesi’s refugee claim, acknowledged that France normally would be expected to protect its citizens. But in Makdesi’s case, he said, “the normal state protection that a French woman could obtain in France disappeared, was simply not there.”

Guénette’s ruling triggered an application for judicial review by the government. And last month, Federal Court Judge Richard Boivin emphatically quashed it and ordered a new hearing before a different IRB member.

Boivin found that Guénette — a lawyer and unsuccessful Ontario Progressive Conservative candidate in Ottawa-Vanier in 1988 — got pretty much everything wrong.

His findings on the availability of state protection in France were “unreasonable, were based on irrelevant considerations and were made without regard to the evidence,” Boivin wrote.

He said Guénette also applied the wrong legal test when assessing whether Makdesi and her children had a viable “internal flight alternative” — another place within France they could go to escape their abuser.

More: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Mother+children+fled+violent+abuser+France+must+face+refugee+hearing/6176008/story.html
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