Daughter fears for mother’s life if deported to Iran
Roghayeh Azizi Mirmahaleh remains stoic as she speaks of her impending deportation to her native Iran, where she believes she will be imprisoned, possibly tortured, even executed. She only begins to weep when she speaks of how it will affect her only daughter, a post-doctoral student at McGill University.
“The Iranian government executed my husband,” Mirmahaleh told the Montreal Gazette through her daughter, who translates her mother’s Persian through her own tears. “Don’t do this to my daughter. Don’t make my daughter suffer more.”
Mirmahaleh, 60, is scheduled to be deported on Feb. 28.
Canadian immigration officials acknowledge that she was imprisoned for three years in Iran in the 1980s, when her daughter was a toddler, because of her support of the political dissent group Mujahedin-E-Khalq (MeK). They also acknowledge that her husband was executed by the Iranian authorities in 1988 because of his involvement with MeK.
Since her arrival in Montreal in 2012, Mirmahaleh has participated in regular protests at Phillips Square against the Iranian government’s human rights abuses, as well as a protest in Ottawa.
Videos of these protests have been posted to YouTube, and to anti-Iranian government websites that are closely monitored by the Iranian government. She says relatives in Iran have contacted her to say they have been questioned by Iranian authorities about her political activities in Canada.
“You are handing me to a regime (that) has no regard for human life, especially Iranian citizens fighting against the Iranian government’s atrocious human rights abuses,” she writes in a letter begging immigration authorities to reverse the deportation order.
Mirmahaleh’s daughter asked to be identified by the pseudonym “Rahar” because she fears being targeted by Iranians in Canada who support the Iranian government. Rahar came to Canada on a student visa in December of 2011, to do her PhD at Concordia University. She says she was threatened by government officials in Iran and her academic career was thwarted because of her parents’ past activities.
She hoped to find a job in Canada, become a permanent citizen and then sponsor her mother. In 2012, she obtained a temporary visitor’s visa for her mother to come to Canada.
When Mirmahaleh’s visitor’s visa expired in late 2013, she applied for refugee status.
In March 2015, she was found inadmissible because of her involvement with MeK.
MeK, also known as the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, is a leftist political organization founded in 1965 to oppose the government of the Shah of Iran. The group organized the protests that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979.
The group initially supported the republic’s founder Ayatollah Khomeini, but eventually turned against the government and has claimed responsibility for a number of bombings and assassinations targeting government leaders.
The group was designated a terrorist organization by Canada in 2005 but delisted it in 2012 following the lead of the U.S., because the group’s leaders had renounced violence and had not been involved in any terrorist activity for at least a decade. Now based in France, MeK claims it wants to replace Tehran’s clerical regime with a secular government through peaceful means.
Mirmahaleh said she supported MeK because she saw it as a human rights organization and the only opposition to an oppressive regime.
Her lawyer, Stéphanie Valois, applied for a pre-removal risk assessment (PRRA), a procedure designed to ensure that people being removed from Canada are not sent to a country where they would be in danger or at risk of persecution.
That application was rejected, without an interview, by an immigration officer who wrote that “the applicant has not sufficiently demonstrated that authorities in Iran are aware of her involvement in political demonstrations in Canada ... nor has the applicant sufficiently demonstrated that this level of political activism outside of Iran would result in her detention or mistreatment” in Iran.
Mirmahaleh, who lives in NotreDame-de-Grâce, has appealed for help to Marc Garneau, the Liberal MP for NDG-Westmount. In a response to the Montreal Gazette’s request for an interview with Garneau, his constituency assistant Eve Desrosiers replied by email: “Our office has been providing support to this constituent and we will continue to evaluate future options.”
Valois said Canada should not risk sending a political activist who has been persecuted and imprisoned in the past by the Iranian government back home, to a regime that imprisoned Canadian Concordia University professor Homa Hoodfar on dubious charges for 112 days last year.
“I am not saying that no one should be inadmissible (to Canada). But this woman is clearly not a security problem for Canada,” said Valois.
Valois filed for a judicial review of the PRRA decision Friday morning, as well as a stay to stop the deportation.
She expects to plead the case in federal court on Thursday.