[antiwar-van] Miraculous holiday news – Nader Released from Detention After Six Years!

[Harsha W.]

Nader Released from Detention After Six Years, now a Protected Person!

http://noii-van.resist.ca/?p=4596

Dear friends and allies of No One Is Illegal Vancouver Coast Salish
Territories,

We are thrilled to be able to share the news with you that Nader has been 
released from detention and his Pre-Removal Risk Assessment has been
accepted!

Nader is a 46 year old Iranian refugee who had been detained and
imprisoned by Canadian Border Services Agency since 2005. Nader spent over
SIX years behind bars, without any substantive charges, under the
jurisdiction of the Immigration Act. His length of detention has been
unprecedented in Canada and Nader had been on a seven-week hunger strike
to protest his ongoing, essentially indefinite detention.

Given the length of time that Nader was in detention, we know that his
release was a direct result of the community organizing and pressure that
was slowly building around this situation over the past six weeks. (We
even received correspondence from the Immigration and Refugee Board
Communications Department about it) His PRRA was accepted literally within
days of it being filed, and Nader was quickly released from behind bars in
order to avoid further public scrutiny of this cruel, inhumane, and unjust
incarceration.

Nader has been released back into the home of his friends and community
and he has finally been reunited with his son after six long years. Nader
says “Thank you to everyone who supported me and took time off from work
and their busy lives to help me and came to my detention hearings. You all
have made a big difference in my life and made this possible for me.”

We are inspired by the courage and steadfastness of Nader, who reached out
and spoke out despite the fear of further punishment behind bars. Despite
a system that silences refugees and forces migrants to remain subservient,
we know that when we fight together we can break these chains. In the
context of increasing detentions and deportations facilitating prison
expansion and a government that insists on treating racialized migrants as
expendable commodities, we re-affirm dignity and self-determination in the
movement for migrant justice.

We look forward to rising together in yet another year of struggle and
liberation as we strive for the right to remain, the freedom to move, and
the right to return. The ongoing apartheid reality instituted through
reserves and sweatshops is one that must be fundamentally uprooted and
transformed. We envision a humanity where everyone has the right to
sustenance and the ability to provide it, where we are free of oppression,
misery, and exploitation, and are able to live meaningfully in
relationship to one another and in reverence for Mother Earth that
sustains us.

No One Is Illegal, Power to the People!

BACKGROUND:

Hunger striking refugee detained for SIX years

Nader is a 46 year old Iranian refugee who has been detained and
imprisoned by Canadian Border Services Agency since 2005. Nader has spent
over six years behind bars, without any substantive charges, under the
jurisdiction of the Immigration Act.

His length of detention is unprecedented in Canada.

Nader arrived to Canada from Iran with his wife and young son in 1997 as
political refugees. At the time they made a claim based on her persecution
in Iran as a dissident. The family’s claim was initially rejected by the
Immigration and Refugee Board in 2000 and shortly after Nader and his wife
separated. His (now ex) wife and son subsequently were granted legal
status but Nader was ordered removed from Canada.

The unjust and cruel rationale provided for his ongoing detention by the
Immigration and Refugee Board is simply the fact that he refuses to sign
documents for his own deportation to Iran. Canadian Border Services have
argued for ongoing (essentially infinite) detention because Nader is
deemed to be “non cooperative in signing documents”. They want him to sign
a document which states he is returning ‘voluntarily’, absolving Canada of
its complicity in his involuntary removal and using detention to pressure
him to lie about his own deportation!

For six years Nader has been incarcerated at Fraser Regional Correctional
Centre, a maximum security provincial facility. This facility is mandated
for short-term offenders whose sentence does not exceed two years. Short
term facilities such as FRCC lack the infrastructure and resources to
house and accommodate long-term inmates. Nader has reported that he has
been subjected to a poor diet and lack of quality health care at FRCC.

Without internet and law library materials (which are available at other
federal facilities), he has been unable to defend and advocate for
himself.

Nader continues to face risk in Iran – a similar risk to what his (now ex)
wife and son were granted asylum for in Canada. Nader has never even had a
refugee claim heard on the basis of his own experience in Iran and fear of
persecution if deported back to Iran. Nader has recently filed a Pre
Removal Risk Assessment and will be pursuing other legal avenues given the
trauma he has suffered in Iran and now in Canada.

According to Nader, “The length of my detention has not been predicated on
any evidence that I am a ‘threat to national security’ or that my release
poses any ‘risk to the public safety’. Yet I have endured the
psychological trauma of confinement and the emotional suffering and
anxiety of being separated from my son (who has since been granted asylum
in Canada).”

For more information please email noii-van at resist.ca or call 778 552
http://noii-van.resist.ca




-- 
Harsha Walia

https://twitter.com/HarshaWalia
https://www.facebook.com/nooneisillegal
http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/author/dtes-power-women-group



-- 
Harsha Walia

https://twitter.com/HarshaWalia
https://www.facebook.com/nooneisillegal
http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/author/dtes-power-women-group