Making room for real refugees: the generosity of the IRB means that Canada is doing less than it should for refugees

By Sally Ding on April 26, 2011

ID:	HARP-443
Title:	Making room for real refugees: the generosity of the IRB means that Canada is doing less than it should for refugees
Source:	International Journal , v.52(4) Fall’97 pg 575-580
Parties:
Dispute Resolution Organ:
Year:	1997
Pages:	0
Author(s):
Keywords:	Canada, citizenship, human rights, movement and residency, civil and political rights, refugee, security, immigration, liberty
Abstract:	There are two kinds of refugees: those who are defined as refugees by the Geneva Convention – that is, they flee their homelands because of a `well-founded fear of persecution’ – and non-Convention refugees, who need temporary protection from some dangerous situation such as civil war. An individual being persecuted may never be able to return home and thus needs to relocate permanently. But someone displaced by a civil war needs only temporary protection. The vast majority of refugees fall into the latter category, a fact that Canada’s refugee tribunal, the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB), does not recognize. The IRIB requires all claimants to tell stories of individual persecution. No proof is required, only that the stories be deemed credible. If they are, the claimants are given Geneva Convention refugee status which usually leads to landed immigrant status and eventually to Canadian citizenship. The IRB has the highest acceptance rate in the world: in 1996, it was 58 per cent but in previous years it has been in the 70 per cent range. The average acceptance rate in other democratic countries is about 15 per cent. The Scandinavian countries, famous for their humanitarianism, usually approve fewer than 5 per cent of refugee claims. The rejection rate everywhere except Canada is high, not because all other countries are inhumane but because international experience over many decades has proven that most refugee claims are unfounded.
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