On May 21, the European parliament debated the issue of Canadian visa requirements for citizens from Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic as it could affect the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) negotiations. You can watch the proceedings on the Europarl website or else on BBC, which ran an article yesterday about the spat.
The European debate, as well as Canadian immigration and refugee policy reforms making their way through parliament this month, virtually ignore the plight of Roma in Europe, exposing yet again the Harper government’s policy of putting trade before human rights.
CETA “will need the approval of the European Parliament – and MEPs from the centre-right, liberal, socialist and democrat groups warned on 21 May 2012 that they might be inclined to vote against the agreement unless Canada drops its demands,” explains the British broadcaster, confirming reports from Canadian media a few weeks ago that the visa issue could blow up and even stop ratification of CETA if not addressed soon.
Prime Minister Harper heard the same message from Czech Prime Minister Petr Nečas during this weekend’s NATO summit in Chicago, according to Czech news sources.
“I regarded it as my duty to correctly inform the Canadian premier that if the situation of the visa regime is not changed this agreement from the Czech side could meet with a whole series of problems including difficulties with ratification in parliament, which for political reasons are wholly understandable,” said the Czech PM, according to Czech Position.
“The imposition of visa requirements on Czechs in July 2009 in an apparent move to head off a wave of asylum applications from Czech Roma visiting the country has long grated on Prague, with the country trying to use its diplomatic muscle in the EU to get Canada to back down,” continues the online news source, adding that Harper “promised reforms to his country’s asylum system by the middle of the year setting out countries, presumably including the Czech Republic, where political asylum applications would not be accepted. This would remove the threat of further applications from the Czech Roma minority while paving the way for the overall visa requirement to be dropped.”
IMMIGRATION REFORMS AND THE ROMA
The reforms Harper is proposing are contained in Bill C-31, which amends Canada’s immigration and refugee laws to, among other things, give Canadian ministers detain-and-deport powers to be applied to refugee applicants from countries deemed to be safe.
In March 2012, the Canadian Council for Refugees debunked some of the myths the federal government was spreading to support the reforms, including that it strengthened the fairness and integrity of Canada’s refugee programs. To the contrary, C-31, “creates a discriminatory two-tier refugee determination system, making it difficult for ‘irregular arrivals’ and refugees from ‘designated countries of origin’ to receive a full and fair hearing of their claim’s merits and denying an appeal,” said CCR. The Bill also “places broad discretionary powers in the hands of the Minister of Immigration and the Minister of Public Safety, rendering decisions about irregular arrivals and designated countries of origin vulnerable to political, trade or military considerations, and to individual bias.”
While groups like CCR and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association say there have been improvements to Bill C-31 since it was reviewed by committee and sent back to the House of Commons on May 14 (ex. the detention period is shortened from one year to between one week and six months), it still gives the federal government too many discretionary powers to send refugee applicants back to dangerous situations without due process.
Veteran journalist Karl Nerenberg explains in a series of reports for Rabble.ca how the Harper reforms apply to the situation for Roma in eastern Europe.
“To Canadians who follow events in Hungary and other Central European countries (including many members of the Hungarian Jewish community in Canada) it is almost unbelievable that the Canadian government is preparing to anoint Hungary with the privileged status of “safe country,'” he writes, quoting Gina Csanyi-Robah of the Toronto Roma Community Centre, who is following the passage of Bill C-31.
“Hungary has not been a safe country for some time, and it is certainly not a safe country now,” she says. “It is not safe for Roma people, nor is it safe for many other non-Roma groups including Jews. If the situation continues to worsen, as most experts believe, Canada will be responsible for not providing a safe haven for Roma refugees in a time of crisis and upheaval in Hungarian and European societies.”
In Hungary in particular, extreme right wing parties, some of them openly sympathetic to Hitler, have paramilitary groups of thugs who “get dressed up in traditional Hungarian Nazi colours and march through Roma communities shouting insults, occasionally breaking windows, and spreading fear.”
Nerenberg continues:
They openly threaten Roma women and children with vile acts of violence, engage in obscene and hateful cyber-threats to Roma activists, and have, at the very least, provoked and inspired anti-Roma violence, including arson and murder.
There are similar street-level groups in the Czech Republic, though in that country the extreme right’s success at the ballot box has mostly been at the local, not the national, level.
In March, the Council of Europe released a report, Human Rights of Roma and Travellers in Europe, which “focuses on specific themes, such as anti-Gypsyism; racially motivated violence; conduct of law enforcement and judicial authorities; forced sterilisations, removal of children from the care of their biological parents; economic and social rights; statelessness, and freedom of movement,” according to a press release from the Council.
“In many European countries Roma and Travellers are still denied basic human rights and suffer blatant racism. They remain far behind others in education, employment, access to decent housing and health. Their average life span is shorter and infant mortality rates are higher compared to other groups,” says the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg, in the release.
Nerenberg questions why neither the authors of this report nor affected Roma groups in Europe were asked to testify to Harper’s Bill C-31 refugee reforms. The journalist says that even supporters of Harper’s refugee reforms, including former diplomat James Bissett and lawyers Julie Taub and Andrew Wlodyka, admitted the Roma face discrimination in Europe.
CETA AT WHATEVER COST: TRADE TRUMPS RIGHTS
I think partly the answer is in the CCR’s comments about the Bill — that it gives Canadian ministers the freedom to make decisions on refugee claims based on trade and other strategic considerations.
There were reports in early 2011 that Canada’s free trade deal with Colombia is already affecting refugee approvals from that country, where Indigenous communities face extinction and labour activists continue to be threatened and murdered with near impunity. An article by Jennifer O’Brien, QMI Agency, found that acceptance rates for refugee applications by Colombians had gone down to 53 per cent in 2010 from between 75 and 83 per cent over the previous ten years.
The article implied there was a link with the then new trade deal — as economic relations deepen, so would pressure from Colombia to reinforce the impression that the country is on the up and up when it comes to rights protection. Canada’s failure to table a real human rights impact assessment of the deal last week reinforces the theory. The same dynamic would apply to Honduras, which was recently tagged one of “the most dangerous places on earth.”
In the EU case, Harper is now in a rush to pass C-31 so he can drop visas for “legitimate” Czech, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Romanian travellers while detaining, quickly processing and deporting Roma back to their “safe” countries in Europe, ignoring damning reports from Hungary and other countries contained in the Council of Europe report.
Harper, CIC Minister Jason Kenney and Trade Minister Ed Fast undoubtedly want to drop their visa requirements for eastern European countries to pave the way for CETA. (I ran into two CIC staffers at a recent EU reception in Ottawa, which could say something about the PR campaign going on behind the scenes.) The European Commission is clearly enthusiastic about Harper’s immigration reforms, along with the EU ambassador to Canada, Bernhard Matthias Brinkmann, who faithfully reproduced the Harper government talking points during testimony to the Commons Immigration Committee recently — that it was a “pull factor” (cash payments to refugees) that brought Roma to Canada.
But as Nerenberg writes in another article about C-31, “There is no evidence that the Roma who came to Canada are primarily motivated by welfare, while there is significant evidence, if one were to ask the Roma themselves, that the main ‘pull factors’ are the tolerant, accepting, multicultural nature of Canadian society.
“Many Roma have told this filmmaker and reporter, and other journalists, that before coming to Canada they had never experienced a country where everyone seems to be, essentially, treated equally, and where skin colour, culture, ethnic origin and religion are of so little importance.”
It’s a vision of Canada that the Harper government seems to be trying to change, and as quickly as possible given the potential for the visa issue to hurt its precious trade negotiations with the EU.
The House is expected to vote on Bill C-31 before the end of this month then go to the Senate. Nerenberg asks, “Will the chamber of sober second thought do its job and make some effort to find out the truth of what is going on in Europe?”
To demand that Bill C-31 is repealed, follow this link to the Canadian Council for Refugees Action Alert. Feel free to add a line to your letter or phone call demanding that the government hear from the Council of Europe experts or Roman communities before C-31 becomes law.
