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Canada will cancel thousands of refugee claims under new retroactive law (www.thestar.com)

submitted 1 day ago by NightOwl@lemmy.ca to c/canada@lemmy.ca

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“This (law) is the most significant rollback of refugee rights in Canada in over a decade,” said Adam Sadinsky of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers. “It’s disappointing that Canada has joined other countries in a race to the bottom in terms of protection of rights for migrants and vulnerable people.”

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[-] lbfgs@programming.dev 1 points 15 hours ago

The UN human rights declaration's right to asylum was built with political asylum in mind, to protect people who are genuine victims of oppression and war. It was not built for economic migrants. The abuse of the system by opportunists killed it for everyone.

[-] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 12 points 15 hours ago

Gee if only there was a way to tell who is seeking asylum for good reasons and who isn't. Maybe some kind of process where you can apply and then the government can examine the application on its merits and make a decision? Oh wait.

[-] lbfgs@programming.dev 5 points 12 hours ago

Did you even read the article? There is a process and the changes outlined in the article are a change to the process to make it less game-able by economic migrants posing as refugees. Namely

anyone who first arrived in Canada after June 24, 2020, will not be allowed to make a refugee claim after one year

Which makes a lot of sense, because it impacts approximately 0 genuine refugees (they either get refugee visas before arrival or tend to apply as soon as they arrive) and cuts out lots of economic migrants posing as refugees (who tend to arrive on a temporary work permit or student visa and want to extend their stay).

The article is NOT about abolishing the right to apply for asylum.

[-] theacharnian@lemmy.ca 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

It denies that right to thousands of people who already legally made a claim. Their human right to seek asylum is being denied.

How would you like it if you had taken all the legal steps to apply for asylum and then a government comes and retroactively decided that, "no, your application never even happened, fuck you"?

And then, let's be clear. Even if 80% (a percentage I pulled out of my ass to look "high", it could well be much less than that) of the 19,000 applications that are likely to be impacted were going to be rejected anyway, that means that 20% of them are legitimate cases. That would be 3800 people who are genuine refugees for whom Canada will just trample over their legitimate right to asylum. The MS St Louis that Canada famously forbade from unloading Jewish refugees fleeing from the fucking Holocaust had about 900 passengers, about 200 of whom ended up in gas chambers. Those 900 people are a stain in Canada's history. And now we are just cancelling the applications, without any recourse, of many times over their number. We should have learned the lesson of MS St Louis.

[-] patatas@sh.itjust.works 2 points 14 hours ago

no no, that's far too onerous. But since you clearly don't like us just blanket rejecting these applications, let's feed the claims into this racist ai machine as a compromise