First wave of Tamil refugees ordered held in detention at hearings
by Clare Ogilvie
The first wave of Tamil refugees to have completed their first immigration hearings will remain in detention for now, the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada ruled Tuesday.
Katpana Nagendra (right) talks to the media outside the refugee hearings in Vancouver on Tuesday. Darshika Selvasivan is on the left.
Photograph courtesy of: Wayne Leidenfrost, PNG
The first wave of Tamil refugees to have completed their first immigration hearings will remain in detention for now, the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada ruled Tuesday.
In all, 75 of the 492 refugee claimants who arrived on the MV Sun Sea on Aug 13 had hearings Tuesday.
The first to appear was a young woman who braved the three-month voyage to reach family in Toronto. She travelled to Canada with her mother, father and brother.
“I ... order that [she] continue to be held on the grounds that her identity has not been established,” IRB member Leeann King said Tuesday.
King heard that the claimant has turned over her original birth certificate and national identity papers to Canadian officials. She has also had one short interview.
But due to the large number of claimants, it will likely take some time for the government to analyze the documents, the IRB heard.
Extra immigration staff have been called in to help deal with the claimants and the immigration process, the IRB was told.
Detainees are being photographed and fingerprinted. Their personal belongings are being held by officials and are being catalogued and analyzed as well.
All the claimants Tuesday at the IRB office in Vancouver were woman, some the mothers of children they brought with them. All wore over-sized hunter-green sweatshirts and grey track pants, their long dark hair held up with a large, tan-coloured rubber bands.
The diminutive women were led into the hearing room in handcuffs.
The names of the claimants cannot be published due to a ruling handed down by King Tuesday morning. It bans the media from printing any information about the claimants that might identify them.
However, the media will be allowed to report on the proceedings.
Normally, hearings are private and closed to the media and public.
Tamil community groups, which had applied to the IRB to be allowed to attend the hearings, will not be allowed to sit in under the same ruling.
That was not welcome news to community representatives.
“We as a community fully respect [the decision],” said Katpana Nagendra of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam.
“But our information to date [is that] none of the migrants that are held in the detentions centres have been given phone access to communicate with outside members.
“That is our concern ... and we will be looking into that further to see what we can do to increase that.
“A lot of people have come and said, ‘My family disappeared at the end of May and maybe they are on that boat, can you help me locate them’.”
The hearings for the men were to be held at the Fraser Regional Corrections Centre, where they are being detained.
All are entitled to hearings within seven days of arriving in Canada.
The next set of hearings for these 75 claimants will be held Aug 24.
The Canadian government has said that it suspects members of the Tamil Tigers — a rebel separatist group branded a terrorist organization by Ottawa — were on the ship.
In two letters, the migrants claim to be escaping persecution in the wake of government–led military operations in northern Sri Lanka, which ended in May 2009.
The United Nations has estimated that the fighting killed at least 80,000 civilians during the 25-year conflict and displaced 280,000.
It has been reported that the claimants may have paid as much as $50,000 each to come to Canada.
The hearings continue.
4 Comments
Agents of Sri Lanka, some of them who work as pseudo terror experts and journalists in other countries are demonising the Tamils who are struggling for their survival even in the seas.
These fake experts continue to deceive the international community by identifying every Tamil child, mother and father as terrorists.
Some Sri Lankan senior cabinet ministers are seeking access to the fleeing refugees so that they can torment the victims even outside Sri Lanka.
No laws in the world would allow the persecutors to meet the their fleeing victims in foreign soil or in international waters unless these foreign countries are also having worst human rights records as Sri Lanka who have no respect for the law.
These so called refugees had safe passage to Thailand and had access to $ 50,000 each. This is beyond the UN charter for refugees.
Now the LTTE splitted into many factions to control their assets overseas. Many who fled Sri Lanka, settled in the WEST, never go back and live in Sri Lanka.
What is this Transnational government of Tamil Eelam? All of them are LTTE supporters or active members of LTTE fronts in Canada. They collected millions to help LTTE terrorists in Sri Lanka and not the poor Tamils of Sri Lanka. Who is paying these Toronto based people to go and stay in Vancouver?
Now a faction of the LTTE splinter group have arrived in Canada. That is why these "LTTE" fronts shows much interest to fool the Canadians.
These are ordinary people fleeing a regime who does not believe in looking after its own citizens. Trying to brand them as "terrorists" is morally wrong. All the so called "terrorists" are languishing in jails in Sri Lanka after its war on terrorism concluded more than a year ago.