Why did Canada reject this refugee?

by Audrey Macklin

This commentary was first published in the Toronto Star on August 15, 2005.

Shazia Khalid has been doubly violated because she is a woman. First, the Pakistani doctor was raped last January. Second, her life, and the lives of her loved ones were threatened by relatives, by her community and by Pakistani authorities when she refused to remain silent and instead sought justice.

According to a recent report in The New York Times, Canada has inflicted a third injury upon her by denying her refugee protection.

It is bitterly ironic that this should happen, since Canada set a global precedent in 1993 by becoming the first country to introduce Guidelines on Gender-Related Persecution and Refugee Status.

Pakistan is notorious for its victimization of women. Rape is viewed less as an assault on a woman's dignity and integrity and more as an affront to family honour, indelibly marking the woman with alleged impurity and shame.

Far from protecting her, the Pakistani justice system exacerbates the humiliation by protecting perpetrators and by applying misogynist laws that treat women as intrinsically less credible than men and potentially criminalize her as a fornicator. Khalid's story is only the most recent highly publicized example of this systemic manifestation of blaming the victim.

Khalid was employed at a Pakistani petroleum plant when she was attacked, blindfolded and repeatedly raped in the middle of the night, allegedly by a senior army officer. Her employers told her to keep quiet, warned her not to report the crime, and then drugged her and confined her in a psychiatric hospital in order to discredit and silence her. Her husband, Khalid Aman, who was out of the country at the time, rushed back to Pakistan to be reunited with his wife.

With her husband's support and despite Pakistan's notorious anti-woman rape laws, Khalid reported the crime. This led to government authorities placing Khalid, her husband and their son under house arrest for two months.

Khalid Aman's grandfather demanded he divorce his wife because her rape had stained the family honour. Aman refused. So the grandfather assembled a mob to kill his wife.

The Pakistani government, embarrassed by the furor, warned the couple to leave the country or face being disappeared ó meaning that they would be killed and their bodies never found. Then Pakistani authorities hustled Shazia and Khalid on a plane for London, without their son.

A refugee is a person who is outside her country of nationality owing to a well-founded fear of persecution because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.

Canada's gender guidelines remind decision-makers that rape can be persecution, that women can be a particular social group, and that a state whose justice system systematically refuses to charge, prosecute and convict rapists, fails in its primary duty to protect its citizens. All of this makes Khalid a refugee.

As soon as they arrived in London, Khalid approached Canadian authorities to inquire about asylum in Canada because she and her husband have friends and relatives here.

Canada said no: They should apply for asylum in Britain, the first place they landed. Maybe Britain will accept their refugee claim, maybe not.

Leaving aside the slim chance of success in Britain, is it wrong for Shazia and Khalid to seek refuge in Canada, where they have a supportive community of relatives and friends, instead of making their asylum claim in Britain?

Asylum seekers who try to choose their destination must not be all that desperate, and therefore not really refugees, or so the argument goes. That is one of the tacit justifications for the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement, whereby Canada-bound asylum seekers who pass through the U.S. en route to Canada will be turned back to America and vice versa.

Yet, it is surely understandable that people who have been wrenched from their homes and traumatized by persecution might legitimately desire to live in a place where their ability to cope and their settlement will be enhanced by an existing support network.

Perhaps Shazia Khalid made a mistake by directly approaching Canadian authorities in London and openly asking for Canada's protection.

She probably did not realize the Canadian High Commission in London is not in the business of granting people visas to enter Canada as refugees. In fact, the number one reason for denying visitor visas to people from countries like Pakistan is to prevent entry to Canada by anyone who might then claim refugee status.

That's why asylum seekers frequently rely on smugglers to find irregular means of entering Canada, where they can apply for refugee status and be heard by an independent tribunal.

It is not too late for Canada to show the world and Khalid why it deserved the international praise it garnered for the gender guidelines introduced a dozen years ago. It can still offer Shazia and her husband refugee protection so that they can live safely in Canada, with the support of relatives and friends and be reunited with their son.

Canada has the power, the laws, and the means. All it takes is a will to justice.