Groups call for border agency watchdog
Civil society groups proposed a model Thursday for independent oversight of the Canada Border Services Agency, following the deaths of two immigration detainees in March.
Recent revelations that the CBSA had fully implemented just one of the 19 recommendations from a coroner’s inquest examining the 2013 death of Lucia Vega Jimenez at the Vancouver airport are another indication that the border agency is in need of oversight, said Josh Paterson of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.
The CBSA is the only law enforcement agency in Canada that has no independent oversight body, noted Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers president Mitch Goldberg, even though officers generally have more power and less training than police.
An oversight body for the CBSA would need to be independent of political influence and have legal power to both investigate and monitor CBSA activities, said Canadian Council for Refugees president Loly Rico. The council has proposed a model for a CBSA oversight body, recommending that it have the ability to receive and review complaints from citizens and non-citizens about their interactions with the CBSA, compel CBSA to share information, and make recommendations to the Public Safety Minister.
Canada has been criticized by three United Nations agencies in the last four years over its treatment of immigration detainees, said Alex Neve, secretary-general of Amnesty International Canada. Some of the practices criticized by the United Nations included the practice of keeping children in detention, the lack of a limit under Canadian law on the amount of time an individual can be detained, and the country’s extensive use of immigration detention, when it should be a last resort, Neve said.
“That is a very strong signal that Canada’s immigration detention system is broken,” he said.
The Canadian Red Cross monitors CBSA detention facilities, but those reports are not made public.