Opinion | The world is realizing the U.S. is no longer committed to basic standards of ... - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...a-b0e3-d55bda07d66a_story.html
asylum refugee migration decency dignity policy trump
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NOT SO long ago, asylum seekers turned to the United States, seeking refuge from repressive states. Now the United States is one of those repressive states.
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That’s the gist of a Canadian federal court ruling, which would scrap a 16-year-old bilateral treaty called the Safe Third Country Agreement, under which Canada and the United States each recognize the other as a safe place to seek refuge. Justice Ann Marie McDonald ruled that Canada’s practice of turning back third-country refugees who try to cross at official points of entry along the U.S.-Canada frontier — on the theory that they have already reached a safe harbor in the United States — no longer makes sense given the atrocious treatment to which they are subjected south of the border. Canada, she wrote, can no longer turn a blind eye to the reality that the United States denies decent and dignified treatment to asylum seekers.
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The judge found that the “accounts of the detainees demonstrate both physical and psychological suffering because of detention, and a real risk that they will not be able to assert asylum claims” in the United States.
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Justice McDonald based her ruling partly on testimony from asylum seekers who described harrowing conditions of confinement in U.S. detention, to which they are automatically taken when turned back by Canada.
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Canada is among the United States’s closest allies; gratuitous America-bashing is not the norm there.
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The question facing the administration of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is whether its neighbor to the south still adheres to what Western democracies regard as the basic standards of dignity and decency on which the original treaty was based. The evidence suggests it does not.