Family from Ukraine deported after last-minute appeal fails
Teen suicidal, diagnosed with PTSD
TORONTO • Canada deported a mentally ill 15-yearold boy to Ukraine on Sunday night, despite medical evidence it is likely to trigger a second suicide attempt.
Two border guards approached Vladyslav Zadorozhnyi the minute he arrived in the departures hall, and asked, as a formality, whether he is ready to go.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said. “I feel very bad. Anxiety.”
Wearing a sporty zip-up and a backpack, his hair carefully gelled, he was taken into the border security office with his mother Maryna Zadorozhna, 34, and his brother Andriy, 7.
They arrived with the tearful parents of Vladyslav’s new best friend, Alex, a classmate in his west Toronto school.
Andriy Ryabinin, Maryna’s husband since Vladyslav was a baby, has been in custody as a flight risk and arrived separately.
Vladyslav, who was hospitalized this week for panic attacks, is diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder and depression as a result of fleeing Ukraine last year and being denied refugee status in Canada.
The deportation, escorted by two officers and a nurse, follows the failure of an emergency appeal to Federal Court.
“As sad and disruptive as the situation might be for Vladyslav, a stay of removal is an exceptional measure,” wrote Mr. Justice René LeBlanc on Sunday afternoon.
Fear of being sent back was “the major trigger of his suicide attempt,” the judge noted,” but the family failed to present adequate evidence of irreparable harm.
A key factor appears to have been Canada’s late discovery of a fraud charge in Ukraine against Andriy. It was first mentioned by Canada on Sept. 14 — more than a year after the family arrived, and a few days after the first scheduled deportation was cancelled at the 11th hour — in a letter from a senior immigration officer with the Backlog Reduction Office of Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
Andriy denies being charged with fraud, and his refugee application includes clean police records checks. His counsel suggests the unspecified charge has been fabricated, and fits with the family’s story about persecution by gangsters allied with crooked police, which a refugee tribunal did not believe.
In an emergency hearing Saturday, the family’s lawyer, Hart Kaminker, argued the process has been procedurally unfair and below the legal standard of how Canada treats children.
Canadian Border Services Agency is “acutely aware of the fragility of Vladyslav’s health,” and putting the family on this “roller-coaster,” with two deportations scheduled in as many weeks, is not being “alert, alive and sensitive” to the boy’s best interests.
Those three words were used by the Supreme Court of Canada, in the 1999 case of Mavis Baker, a Jamaican woman whose four children were born in Canada. The case made a child’s interests a mandatory factor in any deportation decisions that affect the child.
But it did not make them a “primary” consideration. That is the higher standard set by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Canada has signed.
Vladyslav’s file was reviewed by a doctor on behalf of CBSA, who disagreed with a psychiatrist and judged him fit to fly, with no communicable disease. CBSA also confirmed medical staff will be on hand in Kyiv.
Kaminker argued this “implicitly acknowledges that there may be a significant incident on that trip.”
After the Federal Court denied the stay, Kaminker said he will continue to fight to allow them back on humanitarian grounds.
The family submitted a formal complaint about callous behaviour by a CBSA agent toward Vladyslav. They appealed to their MP, James Maloney, who took their case to cabinet and may have won them a brief reprieve. They wrote to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with a “desperate plea.”
Maryna gave a new affidavit with further details of Vladyslav’s suicide attempt on the last day of school in June, including her discovery of him sitting on his bed, clutching a handful of pills, his admission of already taking several times the prescribed dose, her attempts to make him vomit, and his loss of consciousness en route to hospital.
Their flight was to land in Warsaw just after noon Monday, connecting to a flight due in Kyiv at 5:15 p.m. Their home was in Kharkiv, 500 kilometres east.