Refugee group prosecuted by the government
Why is our federal government prosecuting a 65-year-old refugee aid worker?
Janet Hinshaw-Thomas is the founder and director of “Prime-Ecumenical Commitment to Refugees,” an organization based in Pennsylvania, which has been assisting refugees for the past 20 years.
In the last five months, her group has made 19 trips to the Canadian border to help refugees present their claims to Canadian border officials. She reportedly charges these families $250 to cover the costs of travel and accommodations. She doesn’t attempt to circumvent our border controls. Far from it. Instead, she gives the CBSA five days notice by e-mail that she is coming.
Last week, she was charged by the CBSA with an offence under the “Human Smuggling and Trafficking” provisions of our Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA). Because she accompanied more than 10 people (five adults and seven children) from Haiti, she faces life imprisonment, if found guilty.
The Canadian Council for Refugees has “expressed outrage.”
Amnesty International “is concerned” and is calling “for a halt to all legal actions” against Hinshaw-Thomas since it doesn’t appear she was attempting to circumvent immigration controls and “her activities were solely confined to assisting asylum seekers to exercise their right to seek protection.”
IRPA makes it an offence for anyone to “knowingly organize, induce, aid or abet the coming into Canada of one or more persons who are not in possession … of a document required by this Act.”
When our new immigration act was working its way through Parliament in 2001, Liberal MP John McCallum was concerned about the broad language of the section.
In a parliamentary committee meeting held in May 2001, he remarked, “We heard a fair amount of testimony in our hearings from people doing humanitarian work, reverends and saintly people, if you will, and the last people in the world we would want to prosecute. Yet, if you read that literally, it looks like some of these people who are helping refugees could be prosecuted. Or if my sister is in a bad country and I help her, it looks like I can be prosecuted.”
Joan Atkinson addressed the concern on behalf of the immigration department and said no prosecution could be undertaken “without the consent of the Attorney General. That is the protection.”
No doubt McCallum must have felt reassured by the later comments of the Minister of Immigration herself, Elinor Caplan. She addressed a question at a session of the same committee in October 2001 in which she said, “There are 23 million refugees worldwide. Many flee for their lives from persecution with no documentation. Some use smugglers to help them flee. That’s called humanitarian smuggling. It’s something that is recognized in our law today. When it can be proven that someone assisted for humanitarian reasons, such as people fleeing persecution, the minister … does not prosecute in those cases. Often, it is church organizations that help people.”
Really? Then why has our Attorney General, Rob Nicholson, allowed this prosecution to proceed?
It is clear this section is fatally flawed in that it makes no distinction between “reverends and saintly people” and exploiters of refugees.
The protection that was promised is clearly ineffective and the section should be repealed and redrafted.
