As women took to the streets in 2022 to protest Iran’s killing of a youth whose only crime was to show her hair in public, Canada announced “decisive action.”
On Nov. 14, 2022, two Liberal cabinet ministers unveiled a policy they said would “prevent senior members of the Iranian regime from finding safe haven in Canada.”
Almost two years later, the Canadian government has deported only a single high-ranking Iranian official, and the remaining cases underway have fallen into total secrecy.
Although a handful of senior regime members are undergoing deportation hearings, the Immigration and Refugee Board is holding them behind closed doors.
Global News applied to open the cases to public scrutiny but so far has been unsuccessful. The IRB ruled the cases were confidential because the Iranian officials had claimed to be refugees.
On Aug. 23, the IRB ruled the right of Canadians to be informed about the alleged regime members was “outweighed by the significant risks” publicity could cause them.
For the same reason, the IRB also refused to release copies of its decisions on the cases – even redacted versions that had been scrubbed of names and other identifying information.
Granting the protections meant for refugees to accused members of the regime they are escaping makes little sense to Mehdi Moradi, an Iranian-Canadian activist and writer.
“This is something that is totally unacceptable. This is a mockery of justice,” Moradi, who wrote about the issue in The Hill Times newspaper, told Global News in an interview.
He said Iranian-Canadians who fled the Islamic Republic were fearful of the regime members living amongst them, and wanted to know who they were and what positions they held.
“They come here, they become your neighbor. Tomorrow in Canada, they go and open businesses,” he said.
“Maybe they were torturers in Iran, maybe they were Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps generals.”
The families of the 85 Canadian citizens and residents killed when Iran shot down a commercial airliner in 2020 also said they wanted “transparency and openness about cases like these.”
“These people are not really refugee claimants,” said Kourosh Doustshenas, spokesperson for the Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims. “They should not be here in the first place.”
He questioned how senior officials of the Iranian regime could come to Canada and claim to be refugees of the very government they served. “They are running away from themselves,” he said.
Canada’s public safety minister at the time, Marco Medicino, called the ban on top-ranking officials the “strongest sanction imposed on the Iranian regime yet,” when he announced it in 2022.
Two months earlier, Iran’s morality police had arrested 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for wearing an “improper” hijab, and taken her to Tehran’s Vozara detention centre for “re-education.”
Minutes after arriving, she collapsed. Her death on Sept. 16, 2022, followed what a United Nations fact-finding report determined was physical violence she suffered while in custody.
Her death sparked the Women, Life, Freedom movement against the Islamic Republic’s repression of women, but Iranian authorities crushed the protests through mass arrests and killings.
Iran “mobilized the entire security apparatus of the state to repress the protesters who took to the streets after Ms. Amini’s death,” said the report released by the U.N. Human Rights Council in March.
“Credible figures suggest that as many as 551 protesters were killed by the security forces, among them at least 49 women and 68 children. Most deaths were caused by firearms, including assault rifles.”
The brutality of the crackdown prompted Canada to sanction the entire Iranian government, designating it a regime that has “engaged in terrorism and systematic and gross human rights violations.”
Consequently, anyone who had worked for the regime in a senior position from Nov. 15, 2019 was prohibited from entering Canada, and those already here were to be “removed from the country.”
According to figures posted on the Canada Border Services Agency website, 82 visas have been cancelled under the regulations and 15 Iranian officials have been identified for deportation.
One left Canada voluntarily and, as of Aug. 26, eight others had been referred to the IRB to hold hearings to decide whether they should be expelled from the country.
The first to receive a deportation order was Majid Iranmanesh, a science advisor to the vice president who came to Canada to work as a research assistant at the University of Victoria.
In March 2024, Syed Salman Samani became the next to receive a deportation order. He served as Iran’s deputy interior minister, but testified he was unaware his boss had ordered police to kill protesters.
But only one of them has been removed to date, according to the CBSA. Asked why, the agency said foreign citizens can only be deported “once all legal avenues of recourse” have been exhausted.
While five cases are listed as “ongoing,” the CBSA will not disclose the names or the positions of the alleged regime members. Nor will the IRB.
“A refugee claimant needs the ability to present and respond to evidence about their personal circumstances free of any concern that sensitive information that could cause their life to be endangered may enter the public realm,” the IRB wrote in its decision.
“Any hearing that cannot protect the privacy interests of a refugee claimant risks jeopardizing the veracity of evidence presented, may cause significant personal injury to the subject of the proceeding and may serve to undermine the integrity of the entire refugee system.”
The regime figures have likely learned how to navigate Canada’s immigration system and the CBSA is therefore being careful with their cases, Doustshenas said.
But even if deportations have proven slow and secretive, Doustshenas said the ban on Iranian officials had likely deterred others from coming to Canada.
“Now they know the game is up,” he said.
Before the government adopted its new policy two years ago, Canada had become a refuge for Iranian officials and members of the Revolutionary Guard, also known as the IRGC, Moradi said.
He said the IRGC’s killing of dozens of Canadians aboard a commercial airliner that was downed with a missile, followed by the crackdown on the Women, Life, Freedom movement, had prompted Ottawa into action.
The government also outed Iran at the foreign interference commission, disclosing that Tehran had been using pressure tactics to quiet its critics in Canada.
“They try to intimidate us,” Moradi said. “They try to intimidate our families to silence us.”
Moradi said it was “entirely improper” and “fundamentally flawed” for the government to shield the identities of regime members by affording them the safeguards put in place to protect political dissidents.
He accused the Iranian officials of “attempting to exploit legal loopholes to avoid public scrutiny and, in doing so, silently escape their bloody pasts and infiltrate Canadian society.”
On Sunday, the government announced it had expanded its ban on regime members. Under the new rules, anyone who worked for the Islamic Republic in a senior capacity after June 23, 2003 can be deported.
But Moradi said Iranian-Canadians need to know who they are and what they did when they worked in the service of the regime.
“We have questions, but we unfortunately have no answers.”
Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca
