Jason Kenney and Amnesty International Canada have been going back and forth lately over the government's push to deport people linked to crimes against humanity.
The government has already arrested six of the 30 men whose identities were published, and found one is no longer living in Canada. Canada Border Services Agency has deported three of the men arrested, the most recent on Thursday.
One of the citizenship and immigration minister's points is that the Immigration and Refugee Board, a quasi-judicial tribunal, has found reasonable grounds that each of the 30 men on the list to be "complicit in genocide, crimes against humanity or a war crime."
"These findings were based on evidence -- including, in many cases, voluntary admissions -- after formal proceedings during which these men had the right to be represented by counsel," the minister writes.
"The Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) does not make allegations or accusations -- it makes formal findings of fact and its decisions may be appealed to the federal courts."
However, as some have pointed out, those facts can't be the basis for the appeal -- only errors of law.
And one of Amnesty's concerns is that "reasonable grounds" is a far lower standard than you'd see in a court trial.
Peter Showler, who was the IRB chair from 1999 to 2002, says the federal court appeal Kenney refers to, is more like a "half-appeal."
The federal court review is a judicial review, which looks at errors in law. The only way someone can challenge their finding of inadmissibility is to find a legal error in the IRB decision and challenge that.
"You only get to overturn it if they've made a real error of law," Showler said.
"You really don't get a judge to look at and overturn the decision because it's just unreasonable."
"He's taking advantage of the layperson's language, which means if there's some other court or body that can review, it's an appeal," added Showler, who's now director of the Refugee Forum at the University of Ottawa.
No one is disputing that the 30 men in question are in Canada illegally. They had no right to continue to live in Canada once their claims were dismissed by the IRB, and deportation is the government's legal recourse.
But Amnesty says that billing them as war criminals may be inaccurate -- it argues that we just don't know. The government has not provided information showing that the men have been convicted of war crimes, citing privacy -- another point addressed by Kenney in his letter.
In one case, an expert in crimes against humanity in Haiti had reportedly never heard of the Haitian man on the list.
If the men had new evidence to offer after they were deemed inadmissible, there's no hearing where they could present it.
"(The Conservative government is) using language to make these people seem as frightening and evil as possible simply because it makes headlines, but it has nothing to do with the practicality of who needs to be removed from the country," Showler said.
There is a refugee appeal process coming under legislation passed last year, but Showler says he and other experts are concerned it will only give 15 days for appellants to get their cases together -- a timeline he says would be like giving Canadians only 12 hours to prepare their taxes.
