{{Canadian government has ordered a Rwandan national Jean Berchmans Habinshuti 59, to leave Canada soil and find somewherelse to go.}}
The Immigration and Refugee Board has ordered Habinshuti to leave Canada.
Habinshuti has been given until May 29 to leave Canada voluntarily. Failing that, he will be put on a plane destined for Rwanda.
Canadian officials believe Habinshuti a native of Rwanda was in a position of power and influence leading up to the genocide that lasted over 100 days.
“I was not a senior official,” Habinshuti said during an interview in the living room of his family’s modest semi-detached home in this southern Ontario city.
“I was a civil servant — private secretary to the prime minister.”
The distinction is integral to his case. Canadian immigration law forbids anyone who was a senior official in the Rwandan government between 1990 and 1994 from entering the country.
Habinshuti’s lawyer, Lisa Winter-Card, said she filed an application for leave and judicial review to the Federal Court.
She said she is going to file a motion to stay the deportation and expects it to be argued May 26.
Winter-Card said she will cite the Supreme Court case of Rachidi Ekawza Ezokola, in which the court allowed the former Congolese diplomat to appeal the Immigration and Refugee Board ruling that said he may have been complicit by association to crimes against humanity.
“To exclude a claimant from the definition of ‘refugee’…there must be serious reasons for considering that the claimant has voluntarily made a significant and knowing contribution to the organization’s crime or criminal purpose. Decision makers should not overextend the concept of complicity to capture individuals based on mere association or passive acquiescence,” justices Louis LeBel and Morris J. Fish wrote.
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