Special Series: Three years after Tamil asylum seekers land on our shores, Times Colonist investigates Canada’s refugee policy move to the right
It took two migrant ships and 568 Tamil asylum seekers arriving in Victoria to tip Canada’s refugee policy hard to the right. Just hours after the arrival of the second ship, the MV Sun Sea, in August of 2010, public safety minister Vic Toews stood in front of almost two dozen reporters in an auditorium at CFB Esquimalt and said the government “must ensure that our refugee system is not hijacked by criminals or terrorists.”

[ full story |[ Victoria Times Colonist ]

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Risking all to escape: One woman’s story[ Victoria Times Colonist ]

Nirangela and her husband knew when they boarded the MV Sun Sea, along with 490 other men, women and children, that they were in for a long and dangerous journey to Canada. The Tamil couple had waited anxiously for seven months in a muggy apartment building in the Silom district in Bangkok, hiding from the authorities to avoid being arrested as illegal immigrants. Finally, they were taken by bus to the port city of Songkhla, where they crowded onto the rusty cargo ship and watched the land disappear behind them, hoping the next solid ground they touched would be in Canada.

[ full story ]

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The UN’s ‘grave failure’ in Sri Lanka demands an answer[ Globe and Mail ]

It’s been called Ban Ki-moon’s Rwanda moment: a little-reported war three years ago on a tiny Indian Ocean island where tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered, waiting for the United Nations to come and rescue them. What happened in Sri Lanka in 2009 has come back to haunt the UN with the leak of an internal inquiry commissioned by the Secretary-General. The independent report concluded that the UN’s own conduct during the final months of Sri Lanka’s civil war marked a “grave failure.” There was damning criticism of senior staff, who “simply did not perceive the prevention of killing of civilians as their responsibility.” [ full story ]