As Bill C-12 is set to receive its final consideration in Parliament, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has sounded the alarm regarding the Bill’s new ineligibility provisions, which would deny refugee claimants adequate procedural safeguards in assessments of their claims.
As CCLA has noted in parliamentary submissions and testimony, Bill C-12 creates new categories of inadmissibility that strip refugee claimants of their right to a hearing and full appeal before the Immigration and Refugee Board.
These inadmissibility provisions will be based on arbitrary criteria. Anyone who first entered Canada more than a year before claiming refugee status would be inadmissible, despite there being no correlation between the legitimacy of a refugee’s claim and the time someone first entered the country.
A child who visited Canada on vacation with their family, a human rights advocate who came to talk to people in Canada about their home country, or someone fleeing gender-based persecution who needs time dealing with their trauma before advancing a claim—all would be caught by C-12’s sweeping exclusions.
Worse, the Bill will have retroactive application, impacting anyone who first entered the country after June 24, 2020 and did not advance a claim before the legislative regime’s initial introduction.
The government has argued that other mechanisms exist for refugees to advance their claims, but as CCLA and others (including the Senate committee that comprehensively studied the Bill) have noted, these mechanisms lack critical procedural safeguards.
In its observations the UN Human Rights Committee, which is tasked with overseeing and adjudicating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR), echoed civil society concerns regarding the expanded ineligibility criteria, calling on the government to ensure Bill C-12 provides access to “fair and efficient procedures, with all necessary procedural safeguards” in compliance with the principle of non-refoulement.
Yet the government has refused any amendment that would meaningfully mitigate the harm to claimants caused by Bill C-12 including proposed Senate amendments that would have granted refugee claimants a right to a hearing, extended the arbitrary exclusionary period to two years instead of one, limited its unfair retroactive application, or shielded children from its new inadmissibility regime.
Denying refugee claimants key procedural safeguards puts them at dire risk of persecution, torture or worse. It also harms Canada’s credibility on the international stage as a country committed to human rights and refugee protection.
The CCPR Committee’s findings, issued as part of its decennial human rights check-up on Canada, do not stop at Bill C-12, painting an alarming picture of eroding respect for civil liberties in the country.
The Committee points to an assault on the right to peaceful protest, including through expanded surveillance of dissenting voices; a growing tendency to immunize legislation from Charter scrutiny by invoking the notwithstanding clause with dangerous frequency; laws that disproportionately penalize religious minorities by creating barriers to their participation in public employment (notably, Québec’s Bill 21); a failure to adequately address ongoing over-representation of Indigenous and Black people in our criminal justice system; the need for Canada to reconsider its designation of the US as a “safe” third country destination to return refugees in light of the risk this poses to those who transit to Canada through the US; legislative proposals to enact sweeping surveillance powers (including Bill C-2, recently reintroduced as Bill C-22) and more.
Taken together, the overall prognosis of Canada’s human rights landscape is not good.
The Committee’s concluding observations should be a wake-up call to all levels of government in Canada. With respect to Bill C-12, the CCLA is calling on the federal government to accept the Committee’s findings and to reaffirm its commitment to a fair and efficient refugee system that respects human rights by reversing course on this legislative proposal.
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