One-way ticket to uncertain fate in Tehran
Ottawa denies deadly risk in effort to deport activist
Most of what he remembers about those days in January is the cold.
The one thin blanket that only seemed to seal the chill into his bones. The solitary confinement cell — “the hole” — where clattering in the corridor kept him awake all night. The fits of shaking that assailed him night and day. And the nurse who told him, “You’re the one who’s on a hunger strike. We don’t care about you.”
The experiences of 43-year-old Kavoos Soofi Shiaoosh are nothing out of the ordinary for an Iranian prisoner.
But Soofi, a refugee claimant under a deportation order from Citizenship and Immigration Canada, was in the Toronto West Detention Centre, behind bars because the authorities had declared him a flight risk.
And in spite of interventions from lawyers, experts, international human rights organizations and a federal court judge who ordered a stay of deportation on Feb. 3, he may soon be headed for a far worse place, a cell in Iran’s feared Evin prison, if he loses a final risk assessment review.
‘You’re sending me back (to Iran) so they can kill me?’
The charges that would await him are all too familiar: treason, espionage, insulting Islam, apostasy.
They are routinely levelled against those who protest the clerical regime or abandon Islam — both of which Soofi has done. All are punishable by death. His membership in Iran’s increasingly persecuted Kurdish minority augments the danger.
“I did what anyone in Canada is allowed to do, because it’s a free country,” Soofi says while recuperating in his brother’s Thornhill apartment from a month in detention and an 11-day hunger strike.
But claiming rights and freedoms that are taken for granted in Canada can be fatal in Iran, a country that routinely represses, tortures and executes its citizens, with no scruples about its methods of obtaining “confessions” of guilt.
“I had a good job in Iran, but I came here and worked hard so I could know what it’s like to live in freedom,” says Soofi, who had been the sales manager of a computer company. “Canada speaks out against the abuses that are happening in Iran, but it sends people back when they are facing the very same kind of punishment.” Not according to Immigration Canada. It reviewed Soofi’s case and checked all the boxes: risk of persecution, risk of torture, risk to life, risk of cruel or unusual punishment. No, no, no and again no.
“Canada has one of the fairest refugee systems in the world,” it says in an email to the Star, adding that “due process has been followed at every step of Mr. Soofi’s claim for protection.”
So determined was the department that Soofi faced no substantial risks if he returned that the Canada Border Services Agency obtained a travel document from Iran, marking him as a scheduled deportee. To drive the point home, it bought him a one-way ticket to Tehran.
THE HIGHRISE FLAT of Soofi’s brother, Kiomars, is sunny, smartly furnished and
A hunger strike begun after Soofi was detained did not endear him to authorities
warm — in a different galaxy from the detention centres where Soofi unexpectedly spent a month of this winter.
Bespectacled and quietly spoken, he sinks down on the living room couch with a weary smile. He has an apartment of his own, and before his detention ran a small but successful painting company. But in spite of his Sahaja Yoga faith, which embraces universal peace and tranquility, he felt too weak, too shaken to go home alone. He pats his waistline. On his hunger strike in detention he lost 18 pounds.
Ironically, it was his quest for a faith of love, not fear, that first brought him to this.
“I’ve always questioned religion,” he says. “As a teenager in Iran I was thinking, ‘Why should I be a Muslim?’ and ‘Why should I be a Shiite?’ If that faith is damaging our country, we should leave it.”
Born into a well-to-do family of Kurdish origin, in an ethnically divided country where the loyalty of Kurds is suspect, Soofi grew up among lush orchards, and with a vision of a world where people of all faiths and backgrounds could meet on common ground.
But even as a teenage university student, he knew that this world would not materialize in Iran anytime soon. He completed his studies, but he was denied his metallurgical engineering degree without explanation, and he was under surveillance from the omnipresent religious police.
“Iran was going through a bad period in relations with the U.S., and we were fighting for the smallest freedoms,” he recalls. “Just wearing a T-shirt made them suspect you as a western agent.”
When his brother immigrated to Canada, Soofi felt that he needed to breathe fresher air. In 2004, on a two-year renewable student visa, he arrived in Toronto and studied English. When his savings ran out, he started a painting business.
But his spiritual thirst was still unquenched. He renounced Islam and joined the Sahaja Yoga sect, which had a small but active branch in Toronto. An eclectic philosophy that draws on world religions, it was launched by the Indian guru Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, who taught meditation that promotes “innocence, creativity, peace, love and compassion and forgiveness.”
For Soofi, it was the answer he had been looking for.
He became an enthusiastic follower, and recruited other Iranian-canadians through Farsi-language leaflets, newspaper articles, Internet ads and public meetings. “About 500 people signed up for our seminars,” he says. “It wasn’t a huge number, but it was a start.”
But Soofi went beyond conversion. He joined a Facebook group trumpeting, “I am not a Muslim” — the Iranian equivalent of poking the clerical regime in the eye with a stick.
Then came Iran’s 2009 presidential election, the poll that changed, and ended, so many Iranian lives. When tens of thousands insisted that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory was a fraud, a“green Revolution” took root overnight.
Social media summoned a swarm of protesters to the streets. The reaction was swift — thousands of protesters, along with suspected dissidents, were arrested amid reports of torture, rape and beatings. The main opposition leaders were put under house arrest.
In Toronto, Soofi felt frustrated and helpless. “I couldn’t just stand by and watch what was happening in Iran,” he says. He joined local protests, went on Farsi radio shows and wrote rants against the regime in social media. He compared Iran’s revolutionary Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei to Adolf Hitler.
The gestures may have eased Soofi’s pain. But his problems, like those of the Iranian protesters, were only beginning.
SOOFI’S 9/11 moment — the one he will remember as long as he lives — came on Jan. 11 at 9 a.m.
“I was in the middle of a (painting) job. I had to go to the court at 9 a.m., and when I arrived there was a young officer waiting. He gave me the result of the pre-removal assessment and said I was rejected. He said, ‘You must leave as soon as possible.’ ”
The shock was so great, Soofi says, because his relations with the immigration officials had been cordial, and the signals pointed to a positive decision.
That seemed logical, because the Canadian government had ratcheted up sanctions against Iran for its suspected nuclear ambitions, and had turned up the volume of criticism of its human rights record. Ottawa had also defended two men from Canada who were on death row in Tehran on widely decried charges of espionage and insulting Islam.
But on that January day, Soofi says, “the officer told me, ‘You can appeal, but first you must go back to Iran.’ I was stunned. I said, ‘You’re sending me back so they can kill me and then I’ll win the case?’ ”
Then, he says, he was told to talk to a manager in a nearby room. “But instead of a manager there were officers with guns and handcuffs. They took me away. They took everything out of my pockets and put me in an immigration holding centre.”
In desperation, Soofi called his brother to ask for help with bail. The officers had told him it would be around $3,000.
From there, things spiralled alarmingly. “I went to the waiting room right away and they asked me about my assets,” said Kiomars, who runs a construction company. “The judge said that $3,000 was not enough; I should have equity or a certified cheque for $12,000 or more.”
It was a Friday, and the judge told him to come back on Monday. But when he returned with the sum, he waited for hours without any result. Then he was told the judge had decided against bail.
Locked in the Rexdale immigration holding centre, Soofi began an11-day hunger strike. “What else could I do?” he asks. “I was cut off from the world. I was handcuffed and sent to jail. I’ve paid taxes in Canada and never asked for anything from the government, and I was treated as an armed criminal.”
SOOFI KNEW Hehad reached the end of a line that was leading in one direction.
His 2008 refugee claim, based on the danger he would face for having renounced Islam and changed his faith, had been turned down a year later. At the time he said, “I had no money to fight it” — an estimated $50,000 to $100,000 needed for a lengthy legal battle.
Ottawa’s decision to deport him has been sharply criticized by experts on Iran.
“It is completely uninformed and unwarranted,” says Nina Shea, a Washington lawyer and member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. “Iran is an extreme theocracy, and they will see this as apostasy, which can be punished by a death sentence. Espousing
Soofi’s case is going before the same official who ruled against him earlier
another religion is double apostasy.”
When Soofi did file a pre-removal risk assessment application to prevent his deportation in 2011, it was also rejected, in spite of his activities as a dissident and the worsening human rights situation in Iran — fuelled by its rapidly growing expertise in hacking computers and cellphones of Iranians at home and abroad.
“Iran has a very rigorous program of targeting and imprisoning Internet dissidents,” says Ron Deibert, head of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which reports on Iran’s progress in electronic espionage. “This is no secret. All one has to do is read reports of the organizations that track the number of Internet journalists and activists who have been imprisoned, and some sentenced to death.”
Amnesty International was concerned enough to write a detailed three-page letter on Soofi’s plight.
“Should (he) be forcibly returned to Iran it is highly likely that upon arrival he will be questioned about his activities abroad,” it said, referring to mounting reports of arrests of returning failed refugee claimants. Sweden’s immigration director recently wrote new guidelines warning officials that Iran’s monitoring of expats put them at increased risk.
“If the authorities are aware of (Soofi’s) failed asylum claim and subsequent media coverage, his Facebook activities and participation in (anti-regime) demonstrations, he would be charged with promoting propaganda against the Islamic Republic,” Amnesty said.
Even without advanced spying techniques, Iran could read about Soofi’s case from the public record of hearings in the Senate last month.
“Our immigration officials are in the process of deporting Kavoos Soofi despite Amnesty International’s view that he faces a substantial risk of torture or execution,” Mcgill University law professor Payam Akhavan, who monitors human rights in his native Iran, told senators. “If we truly believe that Iran is abusing its citizens, then we should be increasing our intake of refugees rather than deporting the likes of Mr. Soofi.”
Houchang Hassan-yari, an Iranianborn professor of international relations at the Royal Military College of Canada, also testified about the risk that Soofi faced.
“There seems to be a contradiction between the policy of government departments and the prime minister on this issue,” he told the Star. “Since the killing of Zahra Kazemi (a Canadian photojournalist who died in Evin prison in 2003), the government has been actively involved in condemning Iran’s human rights record at the UN. What, then, is its rationale for sending Soofi back?”
WHILE SOOFI SAT
in the Toronto West Detention Centre solitary confinement cell, where he was transferred after he began his hunger strike, he was asking the same question. So were dozens of supporters who rallied and petitioned for his release.
Inside the bleak cell, all he could think of was the damp chill, and the strange journey that had taken him from the fulfilment of a dream to a living nightmare. At the end of it, would he meet the dark presence he had fled Iran to escape?
Shaking with cold, his stomach “burning with hunger,” Soofi persisted in his strike, not knowing that supporters’ attempts to gain clemency were only worsening his plight.
That ordeal ended when he was granted a stay of deportation in February, but his troubles were far from over.
“(Citizenship and Immigration Canada) does not condone Mr. Soofi’s behaviour in intentionally seeking attention in the hopes of strengthening his claim for protection,” the ministry said, adding that refugee claims are “heard in private” for the safety of the claimants. It was an indication that the publicity around his case — including criticism from experts and human rights groups familiar with Iran — may have angered officials.
“First (Soofi) was denied bail,” says his lawyer, Robin Seligman, “then they forced his relatives to pay an astounding sum of money that other lawyers have told me is unusual even for hardened criminals.”
This time the sum was $40,000 in cash, and a $50,000 “performance bond,” with equity of six times the latter amount, or $300,000, to be forfeited if he failed to show up for deportation.
Was the unusual move also a backlash from the Canada Border Services Agency? At the bail hearing, an official representing its head, Security Minister Vic Toews, testified that Soofi had “exacerbated his own circumstances by deliberately making himself the subject of considerable publicity in Canada.”
She argued that he was showing “disrespect” for the deportation decision, and “does not have any rights of a citizen.” And she accused his supporters of “not expressing regard for the laws of Canada” by peacefully protesting — claims that were later retracted in an email from the agency to the Star, acknowledging that “the fundamental freedoms” including peaceful assembly “apply to all persons in Canada.”
Soofi has cause for doubts. Still under a potential deportation order but awaiting a second pre-removal risk assessment, as well as the result of a humanitarian and compassionate application, he has learned that the official assigned to the case is the same one who refused his original claim.
Although the Immigration Ministry’s manual says this practice has been stopped, an official told the Star that if two applications are made at the same time, “one decision maker will look at both.” But he added that “due process continues to be followed,” and the “recent evidence regarding his claim to be at risk on return to Iran” will be considered.
Soofi’s lawyer is unsure. “We submitted fresh applications and were expecting a fresh look at this case,” says Seligman. “I’m very concerned about this officer not being open-minded. She has already made a negative decision, and it is being appealed. The only reason (Soofi) is still in the country is because of a very hard battle in the federal court (to stay his deportation). It isn’t because they realized there have been dramatic changes in the situation in Iran.”
The clock ticks. The space between the dark past and the unknown future is vanishing. For Kavoos Soofi, there is little to do but wait.