This is the Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development. Today, December 9, 2010, is our 38th meeting.
[English]
We are continuing our study into the treatment of sexual minorities in Uganda.
We are very happy today to have as our witnesses two officials from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration. They are Rénald Gilbert, who is the director general for the international region, and Debra Pressé, who is the acting director general for refugee affairs.
I'm sure our clerk has already briefed you about how these things work, and for all I know you are very experienced parliamentary committee attendees. I see one head shaking. Practice makes perfect, and you'll soon be able to do this sort of thing in your sleep.
At any rate, we are very interested to hear what you have to say. I invite you to begin your presentation.
Thank you.
As you've noted, my name is Debra Pressé and I am the acting director general for the refugee affairs branch at Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
[Translation]
Joining me today is Rénald Gilbert, Director General of CIC's International region.
Today I will focus my remarks on refugee criteria issues related to this subcommittee's study of the treatment of sexual minorities in Uganda.
[English]
Mr. Chair, Canada currently resettles between 10,000 and 12,000 refugees from abroad every year. As part of the reforms to our refugee system, this number will increase over the next two to three years to be in the range of 12,000 to 14,500 refugees per year.
The resettlement process begins with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. We call it the UNHCR. The UNHCR has the international mandate to identify and provide protection to refugees.
ln Canada, private sponsors may also identify refugees whom they are willing and able to support.
Canada' s definitions for who is eligible for protection through resettlement are found in our Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations. The legislation provides for three classes of refugees for the purposes of resettlement. One of the classes is the Convention refugee abroad class, which mirrors the 1951 convention definition.
As you know, a refugee by definition is someone who is outside the country of origin and who cannot return, or is unable to return, because of a well-founded fear that he or she will be persecuted upon return to the country of origin. This could be because of race, ethnicity, religion, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.
It should be noted, Mr. Chair, that the definition of a convention refugee does not include gender or sexual orientation as an independently enumerated ground for a well-founded fear of persecution. However, there is a growing body of international jurisprudence that recognizes that persecution based on gender or sexual orientation should be considered persecution based on membership in a particular social group, and the UNHCR does in fact refer persons in this group to Canada for resettlement.
The other two classes of refugees in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations are the country of asylum class and the source country class, and both provide for slightly broader definitions than the 1951 convention.
The country of asylum class is intended to allow protection to persons who have left the country of origin and cannot return because they were seriously impacted in their country and continue to be seriously impacted outside. That impact is because of civil war or armed conflict or because of ongoing suffering of gross violations of human rights.
The source country class is unique in that it addresses people who are still in their country of origin and who would meet the convention refugee definition if they were able to leave. It also addresses people who are either personally impacted by civil war or are suffering a serious deprivation of human rights and have been detained or imprisoned as a consequence of that. The source country class is open only to persons residing in their country of citizenship or habitual residence, and only when that country is listed in schedule 2 of the regulations. To be listed in the regulations, the country itself must be one where the general population is in a refugee-like situation because of civil war or armed conflict.
In all three refugee definitions, the person must have no possibility of another durable solution within a reasonable period of time.
The source country list as a tool, we will acknowledge, is not particularly flexible. It is based in regulation. It currently lists six countries, some of which are not even in a refugee-like situation anymore. The six countries today are Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, and Sierra Leone.
Mr. Chair, the committee has also asked that we explain the urgent protection and group resettlement programs.
Canada and the several other countries that engage in resettlement have formal arrangements in place with the UNHCR whereby we agree to accept a certain number of emergency referrals on an annual basis. These referrals are restricted to refugees who are facing a real and immediate threat to their life, liberty, or physical safety.
Group resettlement, or group processing, as we call it, is an administrative arrangement that we have developed with the UNHCR to allow us to more efficiently move large numbers of persons out of a specific refugee camp.
I want to turn now to the issue of sexual minorities. Currently, as far as we know, about 86 countries, or nearly one-third of all nations on earth, still have a total ban on male homosexuality. A smaller number also ban sex between women.
The penalties in these countries range from a few years in jail to life imprisonment. In a small number of places, the sentence is death.
[Translation]
The Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism has been vocal in expressing his concern about the treatment of and precarious situation for sexual minorities.
This summer, when he toured the country to promote the private sponsorship of refugees program, he encouraged organizations and individuals to sponsor persons, including Iranians, who have been forced to flee persecution based on their sexual orientation.
[English]
This program, the private sponsorship of refugees program, is a key component of Canada's refugee resettlement program whereby Canadian citizens and permanent residents can come together to sponsor refugees living abroad and help them find protection and build a new life in Canada.
In closing, I would mention that our visa office in Nairobi has a total of 10 applications for resettlement, in both our government and private sponsorship programs, in process from nationals of Uganda. None of the 10 persons has claimed to be persecuted on the basis of sexual orientation.
I would also mention that Canada' s resettlement program is global. Our officers go into more than 40 countries a year to interview refugees from over 60 nationalities.
There is no limit to the number of immigration applications people can submit to Canada. This means that today in our Nairobi mission, which serves over a dozen countries in Africa, we have over 7,000 person applications from private sponsors alone waiting for their turn.
[Translation]
Thank you.
We are ready now to answer any questions the committee may have.
:
That's a very good question.
[English]
As I acknowledged in my opening remarks, the tool has not been as flexible as we had hoped it would be when the class was created in 1998. The list has not been reviewed on a very regular basis. The last time it was reviewed was in 2003, and there were no changes made to it.
The regulations stipulate that to be on the list, a country has to be in a situation in which the entire country is a refugee-like situation. Also, to be on the list, the country has to be—and this is the paradox, even though it's in a refugee-like situation with a civil war and armed conflict going on—safe enough for Canadian immigration officials to go in there and work on a routine basis without putting either themselves or the people they're trying to help at risk. There are very few countries in the world that meet those criteria. It also has to be a country that wouldn't undermine our broader government agenda strategies within the United Nations.
Afghanistan is not on the list because Canadians can't routinely work in Afghanistan and Iraq is not on the list because Canadians cannot go into Iraq, yet those are countries that, at first blush, would appear to have one of our largest refugee populations.
It has been difficult to change the list. It does require cabinet approval. It goes through the regulatory process and therefore requires several government departments to agree. There's a broad consultation. Quite frankly, there are countries on the list now that we know could come off, but we don't want to waste the valuable time of members of parliament by taking countries off when we couldn't add any new countries to the list because the countries that people would want to add today are not countries that we can operate in.
:
My answer has two parts.
First, it is a matter of resources. So, this year, in 2010, we provided additional resources to the mission in Nairobi. We sent seven additional people to help with the mission on site, mostly because of the large area to be covered, but that's not the only reason. We actually receive more applications in China in a month than we receive in all of Africa in a year. So it's not really the territory that is the problem, but the communication process, which is often difficult. In offices like those in Nairobi—it's not the only place experiencing this—we need more staff to process the same number of applications. So that answers one part of the question.
I believe my colleague has already addressed the second part of the question. A set number of refugees is accepted each year. So the fact that we have more or less staff members does not make a big difference at the end of the day. If we are asked to take care of 2,000 refugees in a year, that's exactly what we'll do. If we were to move resources, for example, from Damascus to Nairobi, we would also have to change the number of refugees that we accept in the two places.
So that somewhat explains the 50-month wait time. It's not that it actually takes 50 months, but there's already a huge waiting list and we are processing the applications that were submitted earlier.
:
Group resettlement is an administrative operation we put in place with the UNHCR when we're talking about large numbers of people from a specific camp. I'll use the Bhutanese as an example.
It's something we've only ever done with other countries; it's not something we do alone. Eight countries decided to remove close to 70,000 of the 100,000 Bhutanese refugees that had been living in a specific camp since 1990. The Bhutanese all left Bhutan at the same time for the same reason, all ended up in the same place in Nepal, and all stayed there. There had been no movement in and out.
Under normal circumstances the UNHCR or a private sponsor provides us with a very long form--20 to 30 pages--on the refugee's story. With group resettlement, we told the UNHCR we would take 5,000 of those 70,000. Rather than asking them to give us 5,000 forms of 30 pages each, because we knew the 5,000 were part of a complete, comprehensive census and we had received the complete census, we asked for a shorter form.
Instead of going to the camps in Nepal two to four times a year to do a few at a time, Canada goes in once a year to interview 1,000 people at a time with these shorter forms. The arrivals are staggered. It's not faster; it's just a way to use our resources more effectively. Eight countries are in the camp, and we can't all use the generators at the same time, so we take turns going in.
With regard to the 200 Ugandans, group resettlement is something we use when we have an identified group. We have physical identification. We know who they are and where they are, and nobody else is going to pretend to be those people. When we don't know where they are....
:
There are only about 20 countries that do resettlement in the world on a regular basis. About another dozen do it sometimes, on a non-predictable basis. Among the 20 countries, some of us have a formal arrangement with the United Nations wherein we agree to consider a certain number of people for emergency resettlement.
The UNHCR is caring for well over 10 million refugees. They refer between 80,000 to 100,000 refugees a year to the 20 countries who do resettlement, and out of those 80,000 to 100,000, they refer maybe about 300 as truly urgent. Canada has an arrangement whereby we will take up to 100 of those 300 to 400 urgent referrals. There are about four or five other countries that also have that.
So is it possible? Yes, we take referrals from the UNHCR for urgent protection, because it means that you are receiving specific people. It's a very complicated chain. You're talking about getting somebody out of a country very quickly in a few days. There are phone calls. It's a chain of command that goes from the country to us, to our doctors, to make sure the person is physically removed. We have an arrangement with our Canada Border Services Agency. That's where we come up with the number of 100 a year, because we can't tell Canada Border Services Agency to stop all of the hundreds of thousands of things they're doing.
It's a successful program. We are able to take people out within days or weeks, as opposed to months, but again it's a protocol that we have in place with the UNHCR.