Rejected refugee claimant wins right to return: lawyer
OTTAWA — A Libyan man who was tortured at the hands of Moammar Gadhafi’s security forces after he lost his bid for asylum and was deported from Canada along with his wife and four children, two of whom were born here, says he’s finally won the right to return to Canada.
Adel Benhmuda learned Friday that Citizenship and Immigration approved his request for refugee status on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, paving the way for his return likely within weeks, said his Toronto lawyer Andrew Brouwer.
It comes less than three months after the Federal Court ruled immigration officials were biased against the family when they denied their pleas for asylum even after the torture incident. The court ordered a 90-day review of the case and, during that time, about 15,000 people signed a petition imploring the government to bring them back.
“I’m over excited. All the family. It’s a decision that we’ve been waiting for, me and my wife, almost 12 years now since the first time we went to Canada in 2000,” Benhmuda said in a telephone interview from Malta where he, his wife, Aisha Benmatug, and sons Muawiya, 18, Mohamed, 16, Omar, 12, and Adam, 10 have lived since May 2010 after again fleeing Libya.
He hopes to return to Mississauga, a bedroom community west of Toronto, where the family lived previously and has already been offered a job as an optical lab technician. His young sons, whose Canadian kindergarten teacher, Ingrid Kerrigan, started the petition and has long championed their case, are also “very excited” to go back to school.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s office would not confirm the decision Friday and Kenney was not available for comment.
But Brouwer, the family’s lawyer, said he received an email in the morning from a visa post in Paris that simply stated a decision had been made to approve their return.
According to court documents, the family was seeking refugee status because Benhmuda’s brother was an anti-Gadhafi activist which placed them all at risk of persecution. But immigration officials rejected their claim as non-credible in 2003, though it wasn’t until 2008 that they were finally deported.
They were taken in for questioning after arriving in Libya and while his wife and kids were released, Benhmuda was imprisoned and subjected to torture. Released in December 2008, he subsequently couldn’t find work in Libya. The family fled in January 2010, after he was arrested again, and eventually wound up in a refugee camp in Malta.
They applied again for asylum in Canada but their case was rejected in November 2011. They won their appeal in Federal Court a year later when the decision was made to have a different office review the case.