Informant for brutal Ethiopian regime wins another chance to stay in Canada

A former informant for a Marxist-Leninist military junta that ruled Ethiopia for 17 years, and who acknowledged that people he reported on were arrested and imprisoned, with some of them subjected to interrogations, beatings, and torture, has won another chance at staying in Canada.

Mesresha Zewide, an Ethiopian citizen who came here 22 years ago as a refugee, was in the process of applying for permanent residency when immigration officials found in April 2017 that his involvement with Ethiopia’s Derg regime made him inadmissible to Canada for crimes against humanity, and ordered his deportation.

“In June 1989, when he was 17 years of age, (Zewide) was forcibly recruited to work for a local kebele in Addis Ababa. Kelebes were neighbourhood associations established by the governing Derg regime to monitor the political opposition, among other functions,” Justice John Norris wrote in a recent Federal Court decision out of Toronto.

For nearly two years, Zewide “gathered information and informed on individuals suspected of being members of the opposition, including the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and the Ethiopian People’s Liberation Front (EPLF),” said the judge’s July 22 decision.

“People on whom he reported were arrested and imprisoned,” said the decision, noting “some of them would have been subjected to interrogations, beatings, and torture. Such abuses were endemic during the decades the Derg regime was in power.”

Zewide was granted refugee protection in Canada in June 2008 “on the basis of his well-founded fear of persecution at the hands of the EPRDF government.” In May 1991, it overthrew the Derg, the brutal regime for which Zewide worked as an informant, ending the Ethiopian Civil War.

Because of his work for the Derg, Zewide was arrested and detained in Ethiopia. He spent a month in detention before escaping and making his way to Canada.

After he was found inadmissible here, Zewide applied for an exemption on humanitarian and compassionate grounds “on the basis of the unblemished, pro-social life he has lived in Canada since coming here in 2004; his establishment in Canada; the best interests of his daughter (who was born in the United States in 2003 and who continues to live there with her mother); the restrictions he faces when he wishes to travel; and the impact of his provisional status as a Convention refugee on his mental health and overall well being,” said the decision.

Zewide, now 54, “placed particular emphasis on the fact that the events in question happened long ago when, at a young age, he was forcibly conscripted to assist the Derg regime,” said the decision. “He contended that the life he has lived since then, which included political activism in support of human rights in Ethiopia, demonstrated that his past acts do not reflect his true character.”

A senior decision maker with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) turned him down, concluding that positive humanitarian and compassionate factors “were not sufficient to warrant exempting the applicant from the requirement that he not be inadmissible.”

Zewide applied to Federal Court for a review of that decision, arguing it was unreasonable.

“I agree with the applicant that the decision maker resorted to unwarranted speculation in stating that, in the applicant’s case, ‘even if granted permanent residence, I note that it is doubtful he would be granted citizenship, given his inadmissibility which would not be erased by being granted an exemption for the purposes of permanent residence,’” Norris said.

“At issue here was the applicant’s submission that granting him permanent residence would be an essential step towards eventually being able to apply for Canadian citizenship. According to the applicant, if granted, Canadian citizenship would alleviate the burdens he currently faces in being able to maintain contact with family in Ethiopia and, more generally, would finally resolve the provisional nature of his status in Canada. In rejecting this submission, it was an error for the decision maker to speculate about what might or might not happen in the future. The decision maker had no way of knowing whether or not a future decision maker would be persuaded to grant relief to the applicant. It was unreasonable for the decision maker to rely on this consideration to the applicant’s detriment.”

The decision maker accepted that Zewide’s “involvement with the Derg regime ‘was of short duration and he was very young at the time.’ However, the decision maker also found that the applicant ‘has not expressed remorse for his actions which contributed to the regime’s crimes against humanity. Rather, he has repeatedly defended his actions by stating that he had no choice.’”

This, said the judge, “is a serious mischaracterization of the applicant’s position. To begin with, it is unreasonable to suggest that the applicant had ‘defended’ his actions. He has never done so. Furthermore, by linking an absence of remorse with the suggestion that the applicant had defended his actions, the decision maker implies that the applicant had portrayed his actions as right or justified. This was not the applicant’s position. He accepted that his actions — like those of the Derg regime as a whole — were wrong. He submitted, however, that his wrongful actions should be excused to at least some degree because he was only a youth at the time and he did not have a realistic choice other than to do what he did.”

That doesn’t alter the fact that he is inadmissible, said the judge, but it’s “capable of mitigating the significance of that finding in the overall balancing” under the section of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that would allow Immigration Minister Lena Diab to grant him permanent resident status based on humanitarian and compassionate considerations.

The senior decision maker was required to characterize Zewide’s position accurately, Norris said.

“This was a central argument on a key issue raised by the applicant,” said the judge. “The failure to grapple with it meaningfully calls into question whether the decision maker was actually alert and sensitive to the matter before them…. So, too, does the decision maker’s suggestion that the applicant should consider himself lucky to have been granted refugee protection in Canada in the first place and to be able to enjoy even provisional status in Canada. This failure to be alert and sensitive to the particular circumstances of the applicant’s case undermines the reasonableness of the decision maker’s overall balancing of positive and negative factors.”

Norris allowed Zewide’s application for judicial review and sent his case back “for redetermination by another decision maker.”

He “should be given a reasonable opportunity to provide the new decision maker with updated submissions and supporting evidence,” said the judge.

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