Canada's Refugee Status Determination System and the International Norm of Independence

Refugee protection decisions engage migrants’ fundamental life, liberty, and security of the person interests. As a result, refugee protection claimants enjoy institutional and procedural rights under conventional international law. These include the right to a fair adjudication of their protection claims by an independent tribunal. To be independent, a tribunal must meet the formal guarantees of security of tenure, financial security, and administrative independence and must actually be independent, in appearance and practice, from the executive and legislature, particularly in the appointments process. Refugee protection decisions must be made by first instance adjudicative bodies that either fully comply with the requirements of tribunal independence or whose decisions are subject to subsequent review by a tribunal that meets these requirements and has sufficient jurisdiction over the merits of the dispute. The Canadian refugee protection system fails, in certain respects, to meet international standards of independence. The Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board’s Refugee Protection Division enjoys statutory, objective badges of independence and appears to operate independently of the executive. However, the independence of Canadian officials engaged in eligibility determinations and in pre-removal risk assessments is very much in question because they have a closer relationship to executive law enforcement functions.Les décisions sur la protection des réfugiés ont un impact sur les intérêts fondamentaux des migrants ayant trait à leur vie, leur liberté et la sécurité de leur personne. Par conséquent, les demandeurs du statut de réfugié bénéfi cient de droits de nature institutionnelle ainsi que de droits procéduraux en droit international classique. Cela comprend le droit à une décision impartiale sur leurs demandes de protection par un tribunal indépendant. Pour être indépendant, un tribunal doit satisfaire aux garanties formelles d’inamovibilité, de sécurité fi nancière et d’indépendance administrative, et doit eff ectivement être indépendant aussi bien en apparence que dans la pratique, des organes exécutifs et législatifs, tout particulièrement en ce qu’il s’agit du processus pour les nominations. Les décisions sur la protection des réfugiés doivent être rendues par des organismes d’arbitrage de première instance qui soit, satisfaient pleinement aux conditions d’indépendance de tribunal, ou dont les décisions sont sujettes à la révision ultérieure par un tribunal qui satisfait à ces conditions et qui possède suffi samment de juridiction sur le fond du diff érend. Le système canadien de protection des réfugiés ne satisfait pas, à certains égards, aux normes internationales en matière d’indépendance. La Section de la protection des réfugiés de la Commission de l’immigration et du statut de réfugié du Canada jouit de symboles objectifs d’indépendance statutaire et semble opérer indépendamment de l’organe exécutif. Cependant des doutes graves planent sur l’indépendance des fonctionnaires canadiens qui s’occupent de détermination de la recevabilité et d’examen des risques avant renvoi, car ils ont un lien plus rapproché avec des fonctions exécutives d’application des lois

Substantive Review in Appellate Courts since Dunsmuir

In Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick, the Supreme Court re-examined its approach to judicial review of administrative decisions to develop a more coherent and-workable framework. It merged the deferential standards of reasonableness simpliciter and patent unreasonableness into a single reasonableness standard and emphasized the importance of precedent in determining the standard applicable to a specific category of decision makers. The author makes a preliminary assessment of Dunsmuir\u27s impact on judicial review through an analysis of recent Canadian appellate decisions. He concludes that, white Dunsmuir simplifies the standard of review analysis by encouraging courts\u27 reliance on satisfactory precedents and guidelines to determine the appropriate standard, there is a risk that courts may uncritically adhere to inappropriate precedents or carry out unduly intrusive review by inappropriately characterizing as jurisdictional the questions before them. Substantive review retains its complexity, which now resides at the stage of courts\u27 application of the merged reasonableness standard

Substantive Review in Appellate Courts since Dunsmuir

In Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick, the Supreme Court re-examined its approach to judicial review of administrative decisions to develop a more coherent and-workable framework. It merged the deferential standards of reasonableness simpliciter and patent unreasonableness into a single reasonableness standard and emphasized the importance of precedent in determining the standard applicable to a specific category of decision makers. The author makes a preliminary assessment of Dunsmuir\u27s impact on judicial review through an analysis of recent Canadian appellate decisions. He concludes that, white Dunsmuir simplifies the standard of review analysis by encouraging courts\u27 reliance on satisfactory precedents and guidelines to determine the appropriate standard, there is a risk that courts may uncritically adhere to inappropriate precedents or carry out unduly intrusive review by inappropriately characterizing as jurisdictional the questions before them. Substantive review retains its complexity, which now resides at the stage of courts\u27 application of the merged reasonableness standard

T-Branes at the Limits of Geometry

Singular limits of 6D F-theory compactifications are often captured by T-branes, namely a non-abelian configuration of intersecting 7-branes with a nilpotent matrix of normal deformations. The long distance approximation of such 7-branes is a Hitchin-like system in which simple and irregular poles emerge at marked points of the geometry. When multiple matter fields localize at the same point in the geometry, the associated Higgs field can exhibit irregular behavior, namely poles of order greater than one. This provides a geometric mechanism to engineer wild Higgs bundles. Physical constraints such as anomaly cancellation and consistent coupling to gravity also limit the order of such poles. Using this geometric formulation, we unify seemingly different wild Hitchin systems in a single framework in which orders of poles become adjustable parameters dictated by tuning gauge singlet moduli of the F-theory model.Comment: v2: 65 pages, 6 figures, clarifications adde

The Discovery of an Active Galactic Nucleus in the Late-type Galaxy NGC 3621: Spitzer Spectroscopic Observations

We report the discovery of an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) in the nearby SAd galaxy NGC 3621 using Spitzer high spectral resolution observations. These observations reveal the presence of [NeV] 14 um and 24 um emission which is centrally concentrated and peaks at the position of the near-infrared nucleus. Using the [NeV] line luminosity, we estimate that the nuclear bolometric luminosity of the AGN is ~ 5 X 10^41 ergs s^-1, which corresponds based on the Eddington limit to a lower mass limit of the black hole of ~ 4 X 10^3 Msun. Using an order of magnitude estimate for the bulge mass based on the Hubble type of the galaxy, we find that this lower mass limit does not put a strain on the well-known relationship between the black hole mass and the host galaxy's stellar velocity dispersion established in predominantly early-type galaxies. Mutli-wavelength follow-up observations of NGC 3621 are required to obtain more precise estimates of the bulge mass, black hole mass, accretion rate, and nuclear bolometric luminosity. The discovery reported here adds to the growing evidence that a black hole can form and grow in a galaxy with no or minimal bulge.Comment: 5 pages, 7 figures, Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

The Starburst Nature of Lyman-Break Galaxies: Testing UV Extinction with X-rays

We derive the bolometric to X-ray correlation for a local sample of normal and starburst galaxies and use it, in combination with several UV reddening schemes, to predict the 2--8 keV X-ray luminosity for a sample of 24 Lyman-break galaxies in the HDF/CDF-N. We find that the mean X-ray luminosity, as predicted from the Meurer UV reddening relation for starburst galaxies, agrees extremely well with the Brandt stacking analysis. This provides additional evidence that Lyman-break galaxies can be considered as scaled-up local starbursts and that the locally derived starburst UV reddening relation may be a reasonable tool for estimating the UV extinction at high redshift. Our analysis shows that the Lyman-break sample can not have far-IR to far-UV flux ratios similar to nearby ULIGs, as this would predict a mean X-ray luminosity 100 times larger than observed, as well as far-IR luminosities large enough to be detected in the sub-mm. We calculate the UV reddening expected from the Calzetti effective starburst attenuation curve and the radiative transfer models of Witt & Gordon for low metallicity dust in a shell geometry with homogeneous or clumpy dust distributions and find that all are consistent with the observed X-ray emission. Finally, we show that the mean X-ray luminosity of the sample would be under predicted by a factor of 6 if the the far-UV is unattenuated by dust.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in A