They say they fought for democracy. Border guards argue they supported a terror group. Will they get to stay in Canada?

Toronto Star – Attia Elserafy remembers taking to the streets with his family.

A human rights and labour activist all his life, the 60-year-old had been encouraged, he says, by the Arab Spring and saw hope for a new and democratic Egypt.

With his wife and five children in tow, he braved a military crackdown to join thousands of his compatriots at peaceful protests calling for “Bread, Freedom and Social Justice,” under then president Hosni Mubarak’s autocratic government.

The 2011 Egyptian revolution would topple that regime and Elserafy, the head of the General Petroleum Union, was invited to join the leading Freedom and Justice Party, which later formed the country’s first democratically elected government.

“It was a peaceful revolution. The world celebrated it with us. People in Egypt, for the first time, experienced freedom and democracy, and the belief in democracy and our ability to stop corruption,” Elserafy reminisced through an Arabic interpreter recently.

That fledgling democracy, however, was short lived — and today, Elserafy has found himself trying to justify his role and his political allegiances from that tumultuous period in Egypt so that he might start a new life a world away in Canada.

His case is one of a cluster now being highlighted by advocates, who say it shows the unevenness of Canada’s immigration system and the whims to which asylum-seekers can fall prey.

It was in 2013 that the elected president, Mohammed Morsi, was removed by a coalition led by army Chief Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi.

Elserafy said he refused the demand of the new regime to publish a declaration of support and was dismissed from his union job.

Like many supporters and sympathizers of the deposed Morsi government, Elserafy began a life in exile, first in Turkey and then in Canada, where he arrived in 2018 with his wife and three of his five children, claiming political persecution.

In the past six years, until September, 3,381 Egyptians have sought asylum in Canada, many of them on similar grounds, and 2,679 have been granted protection in this country.

However, Elserafy is not among those successful claimants, despite the union’s leader’s profile with the Freedom and Justice Party, which has been dissolved by the Egyptian court.

Instead, he has found himself among a group of Egyptian asylum-seekers facing inadmissibility in Canada for their alleged membership with the party, which was founded in 2011 by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Canada border service agents in Vancouver allege both the Freedom and Justice Party and the Muslim Brotherhood are terrorist groups that promoted violence, and engaged in subversion against a democratic government, even though Canada and most western countries, including the United States, don’t designate them as such.

The Vancouver agents’ position is far from a universal one.

“In other jurisdictions in Canada, individuals who are a member of these organizations actually relied upon that as their refugee claim and were approved,” says Vancouver immigration lawyer Erin Roth, who represents five of these emerging inadmissibility cases against Egyptian claimants.

“We found a whole stack of decisions that were made in those jurisdictions that contained allegations about the Muslim Brotherhood and Freedom and Justice Party, where it was not made an issue. I do not know of any cases in other regional offices where these allegations have been presented.”

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 in Egypt, advocating for the return to the Quran to guide the building of a healthy modern Islamic society that centred on education and much needed social services. It evolved to become a political group, challenging colonialism and authoritarian regimes.

Roth said there are a lot of geopolitical pressure and international propaganda about the nature of the Brotherhood’s activities then and now.

“When CBSA officers are researching, depending on how their own biases appear, they’re going to be pulled or attracted to one side of information versus another,” said Roth.

Mohamed Abdelhameed also has ties to the Freedom and Justice Party, but when he came to Canada, he says, it was not held against him.

Abdelhameed, a former Egyptian parliamentarian and professor of medicine at the University of Alexandria, sat on the Supreme Council of the party, an executive committee of the group, and came to Canada for asylum in January 2017.

The 65-year-old claimed he was persecuted by the current regime and was granted protection by a refugee judge in Quebec in November 2018. He said the border agent in his hearing did not raise any issue with his membership to the political party.

Abdelhameed, who is not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, said the border agents’ allegations against the Egyptian claimants in Vancouver mirrored the rhetoric of Al-Sisi’s regime.

“I was an elected member of the parliament. I have never advocated for violence and neither did my colleagues. And then my name is being put into these military and national security courts (in Egypt), no witnesses, no evidence, no charges,” he said. “It’s all political.”

The Federal Court has made it clear that officials have the authority to order a foreign national inadmissible even if the group the person is alleged to belong to is not on the Canadian government’s designated terrorism list.

Border agents and immigration tribunal adjudicators are independent decision-makers who are given the discretion to rule on admissibility. All it requires are reasonable grounds to believe someone is inadmissible as a security threat by membership to a group that “engages, has engaged and will engage” in espionage, subversion and terrorism.

In Elserafy’s case, the border agency alleged the Muslim Brotherhood promoted violence from 1928 to the 1980s and engaged in subversive activities, including sending its members to fight Israel in 1948 and participating in the revolution against the British colonial rules.

They also claimed the Freedom and Justice Party is the same as the Muslim Brotherhood and it engaged in subversion against the democratic process of drafting and passing the constitution in Egypt.

Elserafy said neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor his party promote violent or terrorist acts.

“The world welcomed the Freedom and Justice Party. It was recognized as a legitimate party from all governments. The Canadian ambassador twice had diplomatic meetings with the Freedom and Justice Party,” said Elserafy, who is not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Those viewpoints are inaccurate and are based on evidence by the Egyptian government and anti-Muslim groups.”

Critics have pointed to the arrests of tens of thousands of political opponents by the Al-Sisi regime since the current president dethroned Morsi.

Egyptian Canadian Khaled Al-Qazzaz has seen the reality first hand. He was the foreign secretary for Morsi, and was arrested at the president’s office in July 2013 by soldiers armed with machine guns. Al-Qazzaz was detained, initially incommunicado, between July 3, 2013 and January 15, 2015.

“What happened in Egypt in 2013 is a full-fledged military coup against a democratically elected president,” said Al-Qazzaz today. “The removal of all forms of democracy, dissolving the parliament, dissolving the constitution that many Egyptians had participated in is actually the act of subversion and not the other way around.

Former Conservative foreign minister John Baird flew to Egypt to lobby for Al-Qazzaz’s release in 2015 on medical grounds while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government successfully brought him back to Canada a year later.

Al-Qazzaz, who has been called as a witness in some of the inadmissibility proceedings against the Egyptians in Vancouver, said he was surprised by evidence the border agency has relied on, including one 2015 report by London-based 9 Bedford Row, “The History of the Muslim Brotherhood,” commissioned by the current Egyptian government.

“These families who have suffered for being part of the democratic process in Egypt have continued to suffer and struggle even when they are theoretically in safe haven in Canada, a place that respects democracy and respects human rights,” said Al-Qazzaz, a member of Human Rights Watch’s Canada Committee.

“It is counterintuitive not to see that those who stood for democracy are the ones now being punished by individual members with the Canada Border Services Agency.”

While some of the Egyptians’ inadmissibility cases only started slowly trickling into the judicial system, Abdelrahman Elmady is believed to be the first person to be found inadmissible in Canada for his membership in the Muslim Brotherhood. His appeal was recently heard by the Federal Court and a decision is pending.

Elmady was excluded from seeking asylum by the border agency upon his arrival in Vancouver in 2017 because he was alleged to be a member of the Freedom and Justice Party. His case was referred to the immigration tribunal, which sided with the border agency.

Roth called the fight between the border agency and these claimants a David and Goliath battle.

“It’s one thing to ask somebody whether they are or not a member and have them provide evidence of their membership. My biggest issue is that these individuals on a case-by-case basis are being asked to prove or disprove the conduct of an organization,” she said.

“One officer or tribunal member can say, ‘Yes, it’s a terrorist organization’ and the next can say, ‘no, it’s not a terrorist organization’ based upon their personal review of the evidence and the specific file. To the extent, it places individuals in a monumental task of basically a parliamentary inquiry.”

Ideally, the Canadian Parliament should create a binding list of designated terrorist organizations to guide inadmissibility decisions made by border agents when applying the provisions on memberships to groups engaging in terrorism and subversion, Roth said.

At the very least, she added, the border agency should establish its own list to ensure some level of consistency in its decision making.

“These individuals shouldn’t have to litigate whether something is or is not a terrorist or subversive organization. That should be left to the parliament,” said Roth. “An individual should be able to go into a hearing or any system of law and have a reasonable expectation as to the outcome.”

According to Roth, even if a person is ultimately recognized as inadmissible by court, they can still be found to be a protected person and can’t be removed if they can show their lives would be at risk if deported. But then they will just languish here with little prospects of getting permanent residence.

Correction — Jan. 4, 2021: Egyptian Canadian Khaled Al-Qazzaz was arrested and detained between July 2013 and January 2015. A previous version of this article said he was detained until June 2015.