Date: 199809-04
Docket: IMM-3948-97
BETWEEN:
CAROLINA ISABEL VALENZUELA ARAYA
MANUEL ANTONIO SEIDER VALENZUELA (a minor)
Applicants
- and -
THE MINISTER OF CITIZENSHIP AND IMMIGRATION
Respondent
REASONS FOR ORDER
GIBSON J.:
[1] These reasons arise out of an application for judicial review of a decision of the Convention Refugee Determination Division (the "CRDD") of the Immigration and Refugee Board wherein the CRDD determined the Applicants not to be Convention refugees within the meaning assigned to that phrase in subsection 2(1) of the Immigration Act.1 The decision of the CRDD is dated the 28th of August, 1997.
[2] The Applicants are mother and son, citizens of Chile. They arrived in Canada on the 27th of December, 1995 and made their claims to Convention refugee status on the 13th of May, 1996. They based their claims to Convention refugee status on an alleged well-founded fear of persecution if required to return to Chile by reason of their membership in a particular social group, that group being severely abused spouses from a nation with, they allege, a patriarchal culture where domestic abuse is tolerated both by society and the state, and children of such spouses.
[3] The testimony of the principal applicant was to the effect that she had been subjected to severe domestic abuse from 1992, at the hands of a common-law partner. She first fled to Canada in September of 1995 leaving her son behind in the care of her brother. The principal applicant returned to Chile in October 1995 and remained there for some nine weeks while she obtained the permission of the father of her child, not the abusive partner, to remove the child from Chile. She remained in hiding throughout the nine week period. She left Chile very shortly after obtaining the required written permission. Following the arrival of the applicants in Canada at the end of December, 1995, there followed a delay of some five months before Convention refugee claims were filed.
[4] The two members of the CRDD panel who heard the applicants" claims wrote separate reasons, both remarkably succinct. In the first set of reasons (the "Zimmer" reasons), Mr. Zimmer found against the applicants on the basis that the principal applicant"s return to Chile from Canada in the autumn of 1995 and the delay in making Convention refugee claims after she and her son arrived in Canada in December of 1995 were both inconsistent with a well-founded fear of persecution, whatever abuse the principal applicant may have suffered in Chile and whatever threats might have been made against her son. That the principal applicant had been subjected to abuse and that a threat or threats had been directed against her son were not questioned.
[5] In separate reasons, CRDD member Morrisson wrote:
I concur with the decision of my colleague and the reasons he has provided for that decision.
[6] In Yusuf v. Minister of Employment and Immigration,2 Mr. Justice Hugessen wrote:
...the only question, and therefore the only test, [to be addressed by the CRDD] is that derived from the definition of Convention Refugee in s.2 of the Act: does the claimant now have a well-founded fear of persecution? Since there was in this case evidence to support the Board"s negative finding on this issue, we would not intervene .
While Yusuf involved an issue of changed country conditions and not one of reavailment and delay, I am nonetheless satisfied that the words of Justice Hugessen are apt here. As in Yusuf, there was here evidence to support the CRDD"s negative finding on the "... only question and therefore the only test..." before it; evidence of reavailment and of delay in making a Convention refugee claim. While the evidence regarding reavailment clearly indicates that it was for the sole purpose of allowing the principal applicant to bring her son to Canada with her, the evidence did not go so far as to establish, at least apparently to the satisfaction of this panel of the CRDD, that other arrangements could not have been made so that the two applicants could have left Chile together when the principal applicant first left or so that her son could have followed her to Canada without her returning to Chile.
[7] In Iazlovitskaia v. The Minister of Employment and Immigration,3 I wrote:
Succinct analysis that traverses the core issues before the CRDD in considering whether or not a claimant before it is a Convention refugee and that effectively supports the conclusion that follows is to be admired and encouraged.
I am satisfied that the succinct analysis in the Zimmer reasons both traverses the core issues that were before the CRDD in this matter and supports the conclusion reached in those reasons.
[8] As indicated above, the Morrisson reasons concur with the decision reached in the Zimmer reasons and those reasons. That, of itself, is sufficient to make the decision here under review unanimous. I therefore regard it as unnecessary to further consider the Morrisson reasons.
[9] For the foregoing reasons, this application for judicial review will be dismissed.
[10] Counsel for the applicant recommended certification of a question that I conclude is not relevant to, let alone determinative of, this application. I will therefore not certify the question proposed. Counsel for the respondent did not recommend a question for certification. No question will be certified.
____________________________
Judge
Ottawa, Ontario
September 4, 1998
__________________2 (1995), 179 N. R. 11 (F.C.A.)
3 25 November, 1993, Court File A-70-93 (F.C.T.D.), (not reported)