ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals that in both parliament and in the courtroom, norms of refugee law are being challenged and reformulated, prompted, it seems, by the difficulties of accommodating the criminal claimant within the process. Access is denied to individuals who have been identified as Convention refugees in other countries. Denial of access is easy to defend by reference to the basic principle that refugee law offers surrogate state protection to those to whom it has been denied. Not only has the Supreme Court shown itself to be willing to place restrictions on rights, it has offered some subtle rights-based reasons for excluding individuals from refugee status, and also, by extension, for excluding individuals from protection under the Convention Against Torture (CAT). The Canadian Government is responding vigorously to the appeals, even as it recognises that its interpretation of the CAT runs counter to that promoted by the Committee on Torture and contradicts jurisprudence from the European Court of Human Rights.
