Helping refugees no longer criminal

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This article was published 28/11/2015 (3384 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg’s Khalid Mahmood was relieved to hear the Supreme Court struck down part of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that criminalized humanitarian workers and family members trying to help undocumented asylum seekers fleeing persecution to enter Canada.

He said he’s taken his chances in the past helping people flee religious persecution in Pakistan to get into Canada through the U.S. to claim refugee status.

“They’re members of the Ahmadiyya religion from Pakistan and they face persecution there,” said Mahmood, a member of the breakaway Muslim sect and longtime Canadian citizen.

“Many refugees are coming here because they want a safe place to live,” said the executive director of Winnipeg’s Ahmadiyya Muslim Centre. In 2012, he went to the duty-free shop in Pembina, N.D., and picked up an Ahmadiyya man from Pakistan, Rashid Ahmed, who had a wife already living in Winnipeg and planned to claim refugee status in Canada. “I was asked to help him,” said Mahmood. When they crossed into Canada, Mahmood said he was held for eight hours and grilled by border agents who called an interpreter to question the Pakistani man he was helping.

“They said ‘You can be charged for this and that’ and I said ‘I don’t mind — I’m not doing anything wrong — I’m helping a person. I’ve lived in Canada for the last 40 years helping refugees.’ “

He said he convinced the border agents he’s with the Winnipeg Ahmadiyya community trying to help a person in need of protection and not a human smuggler up to something nefarious. They let both men go, and Mahmood said the fellow who fled Pakistan is now supporting his family and attending Winnipeg’s Ahmadiyya mosque.

Mahmood admitted it was a risk, and his friend and immigration lawyer Bashir Khan warned him about helping undocumented asylum seekers from places such as Pakistan cross into Canada.

“You can’t guide or assist someone to come to Canada without a visa,” said Khan. “Even a community president or the head of a refugee group runs the risk of being arrested.” The maximum fine or penalty for breaking the law is $500,000 or up to 10 years in prison, he said.

Khan hailed Friday’s Supreme Court decisions regarding the Tamils who worked aboard two ships of asylum seekers that arrived in B.C. in 2009 and 2010. He said the ruling supports the 1951 Geneva Convention against penalizing refugees or those who help them get to safety.

“It’s a good day,” Khan said Friday.

A man who works with newcomers in Winnipeg’s Somali community said he and hundreds of people attending a Canadian Council for Refugees meeting in Toronto Friday cheered the Supreme Court ruling.

‘It’s a good day’

“People were clapping and high-fiving each other,” Abdikheir Ahmed said by phone. “There’s a happy mood that a lot of things are happening for refugees.”

The ruling doesn’t make it any easier for the dozens of Somalis walking under the cover of darkness into Canada from the U.S. at Emerson every year, he said. If they try to enter Canada safely at a port of entry, they will be turned back because the U.S. is considered a safe third country. For Somali asylum seekers, it’s not safe because the majority of their refugee claims will be denied without them getting a proper hearing, say critics.

They face being sent back to war-torn Somalia. Ahmed said they still have to tramp into Canada through farmers’ fields or swim down the Red River, which Yahya Samatar famously did in August, then go to the Canada Border Services Agency from inside Canada to make their refugee claim.

It’s not clear if the Supreme Court decisions Friday relating to Tamils who arrived on ships might help a humanitarian with a boat ferrying asylum seekers down the Red River into Canada.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca