A child in crisis
CBSA READY TO DEPORT 15-YEAR- OLD BOY DESPITE SUICIDE RISK
On Saturday, Canada plans to deport a Ukrainian family of failed refugee claimants, despite a hospital psychiatrist’s warning that it will trigger another suicide attempt by a 15-year-old boy.
The deportation would occur despite the boy’s backlogged application to stay in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds and a formal complaint about the callous behaviour of a border agent.
The decision of the Canada Border Services Agency to deport Andriy Ryabinin, 45, his wife, Maryna Zadorozhna, 34, their sevenyear- old son, Andriy, and Vladyslav Zadorozhnyi, 15, Maryna’s son from a first marriage, has prompted a panicked legal response, including a request for a deferral, on which CBSA has promised to rule by Friday. Anticipating a refusal, the family’s pro bono counsel has already applied to appeal it in Federal Court that same day.
The CBSA decision also raises troubling questions about Canada’s duty of care to children in the refugee context.
In effect, the agency has disregarded the warning of a psychiatrist in the crisis unit of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. It preferred the opinion of a non- psychiatrist consulting doctor who, without meeting the boy, decided he is medically fit to fly because he has no communicable diseases and “does not pose a significant risk to commercial air travel.”
That view is sharply at odds with the advice of the psychiatrist, Nuha AlShammari, that Vladyslav not be deported on medical grounds. She treated him after a “serious suicidal attempt,” by attempted overdose of anti-depressant pills, on his last day of Grade 10 in June, which required him to be on a cardiac protocol until his toxicity levels and heart activity normalized. She found the “trigger” for this attempt was the CBSA’s removal order, issued five days previously.
“Vladyslav is in a fragile mental state. He needs to be closely monitored and receive continuity of care,” she wrote in a report.
Both t he CBSA and a spokesman for Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, who oversees it, declined to comment.
The family has been at risk of deportation since December, when a member of the Immigration and Refugee Board disbelieved the elder Ryabinin’s story of persecution by criminals allied with corrupt police in their home city of Kharkov, Ukraine’s second- l argest city, near the Russian border. The family is of Russian ethnicity.
David Young, the IRB member, was identified in a recent academic investigation as having the secondl owest acceptance r at e among board members.
He believed Ryabinin, an entrepreneur with three clothing stores, two restaurants and a magazine, was the victim of a “swindle” in 2011, and an arson in 2014, but decided the “allegation of a current conspiracy of criminals and government officials extorting him using a threat of death or harm to his family is not supported by credible evidence.”
He noted Ryabinin did not name his persecutors, nor had he reported them to police in Ukraine, which Ryabinin claimed would have been “futile” because of corruption. Young also noted some of his spoken testimony was in greater detail than his written testimony, and concluded that it was fabricated. As a result, the claims of the entire family failed.
Anticipating deportation weighed heavy on Vlad, as he calls himself. He has now lived in Toronto for a year, long enough to make a new best friend, and to establish himself as a leading winger in his soccer club, where his coach Marcelo Lacuesta described him as quiet, solid, determined, talented, wellliked, and nicknamed “Vlad the Tank.”
In an i nterview, Vlad smiled bashfully at the nickname, but was otherwise in evident despair. He said he lives in terror of being sent back to Ukraine. Asked if he was glad his suicide attempt failed, he said, “I don’t know.”
As the family tells it, gangsters started extorting Ryabinin in 2011, demanding he turn over his businesses and pay them more than he could afford, or risk the kidnapping of his family. Vlad, who played elite soccer in the youth development program of FC Metalist Kharkiv, was forbidden from playing any more, for his own safety. Armed bodyguards started driving him and his brother Andriy to school, and he was unable to pursue his first love, a girl called Darya. He cannot even contact her now, for fear of revealing his location.
Threatening phone calls escalated to a physical attack on Maryna, in which she was doused with water and told next time it would be acid. Later, her car was run off the road with Vlad inside. Vlad said he saw a threatening text about himself on his stepfather’s phone. Eventually, just before they fled, Ryabinin was forced to sign over money with a gun to his head, according to Maryna.
So the family fled through Belarus and the Baltic states, travelling by bus, staying in hotels, fearing they were pursued by hired killers. A Ukrainian agent arranged Canadian visas for them, but Vlad did not even know their final destination until they reached Warsaw.
They flew to Canada last August. When their claims were refused, Vlad’s depression escalated to suicidal thoughts. A psychiatrist diagnosed depression and post- traumatic stress disorder, and prescribed the pills on which he would later overdose.
On June 3, the family was summoned to CBSA and, despite pleas to take into account Vlad’s health, were told their deportation was booked for July 2.
This visit led to the complaint against CBSA officer Rudy Vogleson, who allegedly threatened Vlad with an Interpol warrant if he decided to escape deportation, and said he could be physically restrained and forcibly boarded if he put up any resistance. The complaint alleges this “verbal assault” left Vlad shaking with despair and contributed to his suicide attempt five days later.
Vogleson did not reply to a phone message requesting comment.
Jane Katkova-Brown, the family’s co- counsel with Hart Kaminker, put it bluntly: “We should not treat foreign children as foreign. We should treat them as children.”
Today, Vlad has stopped taking his medication because he found it made it difficult to think clearly, and simply suppressed his rage, bottled it up, until he felt at risk of more impulsive acts of self-harm, such as punching himself.
Amy Soberano, a trauma counsellor with the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture, described Vlad’s “complex history of trauma compounded by forced migration and precarious immigration status,” and expressed concern for his well- being if he were sent back to Ukraine.