Open access article on access to justice in Canadian immigration detention
Published: 1 Sep 2016
Dear all,
Petra Molnar—a refugee law scholar and lawyer with the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic—and I would like to share an academic article we’ve coauthored on access to justice for Canadian immigration detainees. The article was published as part of a Refugee Survey Quarterly special issue on immigration detention. If you are interested in reading the article but cannot get around the firewall, please contact us directly. It is our hope that these research findings may assist others’ efforts as well.
The growing Canadian immigration detention system touches upon the lives of thousands of people daily. However, despite significant legal and normative problems, the Canadian detention system seems to be escaping sustained scrutiny. To address this gap, we employ the rubric of “access to justice” to refocus on inequalities being reproduced in the legal system that impede fair, unprejudiced, and non-arbitrary treatment for minorities and vulnerable people. If law is meant to govern equally and to ensure against arbitrary deprivations of liberty, immigration detainees should not be placed outside its reaches. Yet, our examination of access to justice in the Canadian detention system demonstrates that exactly this sort of displacement is occurring. Above and beyond the basic deprivation of liberty and setback to immigrants and asylum-seekers’ interests, detention inflicts irreparable psychological, physical, and social damage. We point to issues such as deteriorating daily detention conditions, far-flung facilities locations, unfair discretionary decision-making, lack of options for women, children, and vulnerable people, the compounding reasons for indefinite detention, and inadequate legal aid and access to counsel. Canada is propagating an extremely costly and ineffective system of administrative detention that is often in contravention of national and international standards on immigration detention.
With best wishes,
SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, GSPIA, Ottawa
2015 Bora Laskin National Fellow in Human Rights Research
Adjunct Professor, Centre for Ethics, Trinity College, Toronto