Canada wants to rethink Safe Country Agreement with the United States

Nov. 11, 2019 por Isolda Barrera

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The United States has been trying to convince Mexico for months to become a safe country for asylum seekers, and has signed agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras with the same objective. But, meanwhile, activists in favor of immigrants are pressuring Canadian justice to decree that the United States is not a safe country, so that the thousands of asylum seekers who have crossed the northern border can stay there.

US immigration law requires the admission of asylum applications for migrants who arrive at the border, provided they have not previously passed through a safe country where they could have taken refuge without continuing on their way to the United States. Until this year, for the United States only Canada was.

The government that presides over Donald Trump tried to have Mexico sign an agreement to become a safe country. That way, he could automatically deny asylum to all migrants who requested it if they reached their southern border without first requesting it in Mexico. He did not succeed because the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador refused, but he did get the three Central American countries to sign an agreement in that regard.

The hardness of US immigration policy has led in the last three years to more than 50,000 people to illegally cross the border between this country and Canada to request asylum there.

If the United States were considered a safe country, Canada could automatically reject its asylum applications. But a group of humanitarian organizations, including Amnesty International, has come to Canadian justice to try to prove that, under Trump's presidency, it has ceased to be so for immigrants and refugees.

As an example, that has been cited before in cases of asylum seekers returned from Canada to the United States only to be imprisoned and locked in solitary confinement for weeks, with hardly any access to a lawyer.

The Canadian government denied Friday that the rights of asylum seekers are violated by the safe third country agreement signed in 2002 with the United States. In fact, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wants to extend that agreement to apply it to the entire border, and not just to official ports.

The federal court in Toronto examining the case has already heard the parties and is now preparing its sentence. This agreement was already brought before Canadian justice in 2005, but then the lawsuit was rejected by an appellate court.

The only difference now is that Donald Trump is in charge, and its negative effect on the lives of migrants.

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