Refugees in Legal Limbo in Canada Due to Asylum Backlog
Asylum seekers in Canada are spending increasing periods of time in legal limbo as the country’s refugee system struggles with a growing backlog of claims.
The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB) said the increase in asylum applications “currently exceeds the operational capacity.”
The IRB said there was a 69 percent increase in non-Syrian asylum applications between 2014 and 2016, rising from 14,000 to more than 23,600 last year. (Syrians who flee to Canada are fast-tracked through the system.)
More asylum seekers are arriving in Canada after crossing the U.S. border since the inauguration of Donald Trump – 3,500 asylum seekers have come by foot since January.
Immigration officials told Reuters that the government is now prioritizing its backlog of about 24,000 applications, which include some claims made before 2012.
The average waiting period for the application process is at its highest in five years, with asylum seekers now waiting 5.6 months versus 3.6 months in 2013. Almost half of all hearings in the first five months of 2017 have been canceled or delayed.
This leaves asylum seekers in legal limbo, making it difficult to secure a job or housing or register their children for school.
Survey: Most Europeans Support ‘Proportional Allocation’ of Refugees
A recent survey of people from 15 European countries found that 72 percent support a European asylum system that fairly distributes asylum seekers in proportion to a country’s capacity.
Only 18 percent of respondents were supportive of the current Dublin regulation, which stipulates that most refugees must apply for asylum in the first E.U. country in which they arrive.
The results “suggest that citizens care deeply about the fairness of the responsibility-sharing mechanism,” said the authors of the survey, which was published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
They surveyed 18,000 people from Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Britain.
“Reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) has emerged as an urgent policy challenge for European governments … Policymakers are struggling to design robust and fair asylum policies that … also inspire domestic public support,” the paper concludes.
Danish Political Party: Mediterranean Rescue Ships Should Not Receive Aid
Leaders of the center-right political party Venstre in Denmark said the government should not fund NGOs operating search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean Sea.
“We should look at where these organizations get their funds from, and if it comes from Denmark, we should strongly reconsider continuing to give them support,” Venstre’s immigration spokesperson Marcus Knuth told Berlingske newspaper. The far-right Danish People’s Party also supports the proposal.
Save the Children Denmark is the only NGO operating ships in the Mediterranean that gets Danish funding, the newspaper reported.
NGOs strongly reject claims by an Italian prosecutor and some right-wing parties that rescuing people at sea incentivizes traffickers and migrants to cross the Mediterranean.
Recommended Reads
- The New York Times: After a Century, Syrian Refugees Return to Armenia
- Advocate: The Situation for LGBT Asylum Seekers Just Got Even More Dire
- CBS: What Even Exiled North Koreans Miss About Home
- IRIN: How the Lebanese School System Is Segregating Refugees
- Asylum Seeker Resource Centre: 35 Things You Can Do Right Now to Help Refugees