The Toronto Star reports, “On December 8, 2009, Jan Szamko (a 31-year-old Roma refugee from the Czech Republic) became the first person to die in the Greater Toronto Area while being held (in government detention at the Toronto West Detention Centre) for immigration reasons. No one had believed his complaints about chest pains or heeded his refusal to eat or drink over the last two days of his life. His constant moans and groans in a segregated cell yielded no attention. …Szamko died of heart failure, probably stemming from a viral infection which led to a lethal level of fluid buildup that compressed the heart, lowered his blood pressure and subsequently shut down his bodily functions. …On the day he died, Szamko was found face down, naked on the concrete floor of his jail cell…”
“Szamko, a factory worker, joined his wife (of thirteen years), Nadezda Peterova, and 9-year-old daughter, Sabina, in Canada in 2008. He filed a refugee claim based on alleged persecution by neo-Nazis in their homeland. When Szamko heard in 2009 that his mother was dying back in the Czech Republic, he withdrew his asylum claim and made plans to leave voluntarily. But he allegedly changed his mind after learning of her death. He was twice booked to be deported but missed the appointment due to undisclosed medical emergencies. He was arrested November 28, 2009, on a warrant and detained at the Rexdale immigration holding centre. …On Dec. 5, Szamko complained about chest pains and was sent to the William Osler Health Centre, where test results suggested nothing was out of the ordinary. An emergency room doctor declared the patient ‘good to fly’ for his scheduled deportation next day.” He died in custody just a few days later.
There is an additional context to this tragic story that doesn’t appear to have been raised in the coroner’s inquest into Mr. Szamko’s death that took place in Toronto this past week. In 2009, the Harper government imposed new visa requirements for Czech citizens entering Canada because refugee claims from that country had risen in recent years. Why would claims have been on the rise? Amnesty International writes, “The Roma community suffers massive discrimination throughout Europe. Denied their rights to housing, employment, healthcare and education, Roma are often victims of forced evictions, racist attacks and police ill-treatment. …An estimated 300,000 Roma live in the Czech Republic, making up less than 3 per cent of the population. Unemployment particularly affects Czech Roma communities, who are estimated by some sources to make up a third of all those registered as unemployed in the Czech Republic. The Roma are also among the most vulnerable to police ill-treatment and other racially motivated violence.”
In December 2010, the Czech Republic responded to the Harper imposed visa restrictions by linking the visa issue to the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). To address this threat, in late-January 2011 the Harper government sent a delegation to the Czech Republic to assess whether it could lift the visa restrictions without permitting a new wave of Roma refugee claimants. But by that same month the Czech parliament was blocking a Canada-EU air transportation agreement over the visa row. By mid-February, a report by the House of Commons parliamentary committee on trade, based on a fact-finding mission to Europe several months earlier, noted they were hearing concerns being expressed by EU parliamentarians over the visa rules. They were right, by early-March, the European Parliament had adopted a declaration criticizing the Harper government’s visa restrictions on those from the Czech Republic entering Canada and said if the situation was not resolved soon the EU would initiate retaliatory measures.
Today’s Toronto Star article is at http://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/immigration/article/962069–not-good-to-fly-the-tragic-death-of-a-roma-refugee.