These changes, considered cumulatively, remove the ability of a significant number of women who come to Canada with their abusers and rely on the abuser’s refugee claim while living under his power and control, to have their risk of persecution assessed at all. The lives of many women will be put at risk and Canada’s reputation as a safe haven of gender equality will be severely undermined.
Read the full submission here:
“Too many tax dollars are spent on bogus refugees. We need to send a message to those who would abuse Canada’s generous asylum system that if you are not in need of protection, you will be sent home quickly,” added Minister Kenney.
…the Minister will be given the power to designate certain countries as safe. Refugee claimants from those countries will not get access to the full refugee determination system (including the appeal at the Refugee Appeal Division).This will have disproportionate effects on refugees facing persecution on account of gender and/or sexual orientation, because empirical research shows that such refugees disproportionately come from countries with low overall success rates (even though this subset of claimants from those countries do quite well). In other words: countries that are safe for most folks may not be safe for women and sexual minorities.….the process through which the Minister designates countries as safe does not take these differences into account. You can see some of the empirical research on grant rates for gender/sexual orientation claims in my article, Do Women Refugee Judges Really Make a Difference? (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1963924).