Refugee lawyers to meet new standards
After complaints of poor representation, Legal Aid will vet prospective counsel before they are allowed to take on refugee claimants
Ontario legal aid has launched a new system to “vet and weed out” bad refugee lawyers in order to ensure asylum seekers receive quality representation.
After two years of consultations, the body that administers the province’s legal aid program will start screening lawyers representing refugee claimants based on their experience, expertise and records if they want to be paid to do asylum cases.
Last year, Canada received 13,133 asylum claims.
Two-thirds of them were in central region that covers Greater Toronto.
The reform — part of an initiative to assure the quality of government-funded legal services that will extend to other areas of law practices — arises from ongoing concerns over poor representation of the most vulnerable by some lawyers in jeopardizing legitimate refugees’ claims for protection.
“We are going to have a new set of quality standards for refugee lawyers. It’s going to be a more rigorous system to police and monitor compliance standards,” said Andrew Brouwer, acting senior counsel of legal aid’s immigration and refugee law section.
“Refugee lawyers must demonstrate their competency or legal aid will deny them opportunities to represent legal aid clients in the future. We are going deep to make sure we have a thorough system to vet and weed out the bad apples.”
Legal Aid Ontario has set a July 17 deadline for lawyers to submit to the screening process, where they must fill out an application to detail their experience in representing refugees at the Immigration and Refugee Board and Federal Court of Canada.
Applicants must include at least two case files they personally handled in 2014, which will be assessed by an expert panel based on a new step-by-step guide detailing what procedures refugee lawyers are expected to follow.
Any lawyer who does not apply before then or fails to meet the standards will be removed from legal aid’s roster. There are currently about 650 lawyers in the province who do refugee cases, the majority of them covered by legal aid.
Refugee advocates welcome Legal Aid Ontario’s new initiative.
“Most lawyers who choose to accept legal aid and help refugees do so out of a sense of social responsibility, and do more than what they are compensated for,” said Raoul Boulakia, president of the Refugee Lawyers Association of Ontario.
“We have been asking for many years that the minority who represent people negligently be removed from the legal aid panel.”
In a recently published study, Osgoode Hall Law School professor Sean Rehaag and his research team found questionable quality of counsel as a cause for Hungarian Roma refugees’ low acceptance rates by the refugee board.
He said the new standards are a step in the right direction because it can increase oversight of publicly funded legal services for refugees.
However, Rehaag also has reservations as to whether refugee lawyers, despite their diligence and good intent, are able to do everything expected of them with the limited number of hours Legal Aid Ontario pays for.
“One issue is: Are the lawyers on their refugee panel not providing quality legal services?” said Rehaag.
“The other issue is: Is legal aid providing enough resources to allow counsels to provide quality services? If not, some lawyers are going to stop seeing refugee clients on legal aid.”