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(CNN)Canada is ending its pandemic-era policy of turning backmost asylum-seekers trying to transverse into the state betwixt ports of entry, according to a revised argumentation papers released connected Sunday.
Canada turned astatine slightest 544 would-be refugees backmost to the Unites States betwixt March 2020 and mid-October. The authorities did not instantly respond to questions regarding wherefore it was ending the argumentation present and what if immoderate quarantine rules would use to asylum-seekers who are not vaccinated.
Canada had said the measurement was indispensable fixed wellness concerns during the coronavirus pandemic. But exile advocates argued attempts to assertion asylum should not beryllium considered "discretionary travel" and pointed to people exemptions Canada made during the pandemic for nonrecreational athletes, among others.
"It's a alleviation to spot the measures for refugees align much with our planetary obligations, and I deliberation it's been wide each on that nationalist wellness and exile extortion could coexist," said Maureen Silcoff, a exile lawyer and past president of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, which took the authorities to tribunal implicit the policy.
Silcoff said it did not marque consciousness to let tourists entry, arsenic Canada has begun to do, portion barring radical seeking protection.
An chartless fig of asylum-seekers turned backmost were taken into indefinite U.S. migration detention and astatine slightest 2 were deported, exile lawyers moving connected their cases say.
Exemptions person been disposable since the argumentation began, and successful August Canada began allowing much turned-back asylum-seekers to instrumentality and record exile claims arsenic portion of what it called a "managed attack to reopening the border."
But advocates said this enactment was lone unfastened to those alert of it oregon who had ineligible counsel acquainted with Canada's shifting system. The authorities defended the argumentation successful tribunal past month.
Canada has a Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S. nether which asylum-seekers trying to transverse astatine authoritative ports of introduction are turned back. The agreement, challenged twice, was upheld astir precocious this past outpouring and whitethorn spell to Canada's Supreme Court.
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