Audrey Macklin

• University of Toronto

The human right to leave any country protects an intrinsic interest in free movement and is also a vital pre-condition to seeking asylum. The right to leave attracts little academic interest, but it is quietly being eroded. Exit restrictions in States of origin or transit have become an instrument of extraterritorial migration control for European...

The global spread of Covid-19 not only disrupted transborder movement. In many (if not most) states, stasis and closure became the default norm at and within borders. This, in turn, generated exceptions organised around an idea of ‘essential’ entry. The category of ‘essential’ was produced, revised, and represented through the interaction of pandem...

Four of the men convicted as part of the Toronto 18 prosecution were subject to citizenship revocation on grounds of terrorism. One of the four was born in Canada, and the other three immigrated to Canada and acquired citizenship through naturalization. I situate the politics of the four men’s citizenship revocation in legal and comparative context...

A handful of Canadian church congregations provide sanctuary to failed asylum seekers. Many also participate in resettling refugees through a government program called private sponsorship. Both sanctuary and sponsorship arise as specific modes of hospitality in response to practices of exclusion and inclusion under national migration regimes. Sanct...

Canada has been seen globally as a leader in immigration and integration policies and programs and as an attractive and welcoming country for immigrants, refugees, temporary foreign workers, and international students. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed some of the strengths of Canada’s immigration system, as well as some of the fault lines that ha...

The global migration of COVID-19 not only disrupted transborder movement. In many (if not most) states, statis, and closure became the default norm at and within borders. This, in turn, generated exceptions organized around an idea of “essential” entry. The category of “essential” was produced, revised, and represented through the interaction of pa...

In this rejoinder I respond to the various contributors and defends my position regarding the normative, legal, and practical deficiencies of citizenship revocation on national security grounds.

From antiquity to the late 20th century, denationalisation was a tool used by states to rid themselves of political dissidents, convicted criminals and ethnic, religious or racial minorities. The latest target of denationalisation is the convicted terrorist, or the suspected terrorist, or the potential terrorist, or maybe the associate of a terrori...

Faith-based and other civil society organizations, along with more ad-hoc groups of Canadians, have sustained a continuous program of private refugee sponsorship in Canada for 40 years. The Syrian refugee exodus inspired thousands of Canadians with little or no prior experience to also take up refugee sponsorship. Little is known about private spon...

The present chapter focuses on the evolution of Canadian citizenship under the Conservative government (2006–2015), and makes three claims. First the Conservatives systematically resiled from the citizenship policies that typify a settler society, and this was congruent with parallel changes to Canadian immigration policy. Second, citizenship law f...

[N]ationality is a legal bond having as its basis a social fact of attachment, a genuine connection of existence, interests and sentiments, together with the existence of reciprocal rights and duties. It may be said to constitute the juridical expression of the fact that the individual … is in fact more closely connected with the population of the...

Professors Hathaway and Macklin debate the legality of the "presumption of state protection" that the Supreme Court of Canada established as a matter of Canadian refugee law in the Ward decision. Professor Hathaway argues that this presumption should be rejected because it lacks a sound empirical basis and because it conflicts with the relatively l...

In this EUDO CITIZENSHIP Forum Debate, several authors discuss the growing trend in Europe and North America of using denationalisation of citizens as a counter-terrorism strategy. The deprivation of citizenship status, alongside passport revocation, and denial of re-admission to citizens returning from abroad, manifest the securitisation of citize...

Since 9/11, Western governments have redefined what it means to be a citizen. Though citizenship is often thought of as an inalienable right, the emergence of the "homegrown" terrorist has called into question whether certain citizens deserve the protection that citizenship status provides. Although international treaties preclude a country from re...

The debate surrounding judicial recognition of faith-based arbitration is typically framed as a multicultural contest between the liberal, gender-equal neutrality of public law and the patriarchal particularity of religious law. Within this framework, the state is understood as advancing the goal of protecting the ‘encultured subject’ from the dise...

Omar Khadr is a Canadian citizen captured in 2002 at age 15 in Afghanistan by the US. He was detained thereafter at Bagram and at Guantanamo Bay. Canada sent intelligence officers to interrogate Omar at Guantanamo Bay on several occasions. The Canadian officials knew that Omar had been tortured by his US captors and was being detained in conditions...

Introduction Asylum policies seem to migrate across borders with notably greater ease than asylum seekers themselves. Many - though not all - of these 'mobile' asylum policy instruments aim to securitize, deter, deflect and reject asylum seekers. The easy circulation and morphing of ideas between Canada, the US, Australia, the EU Member States and...

Canada’s recognition of dual citizenship in 1978 followed earlier moves by the United Kingdom and France (among other countries). The forces of globalization validate the wisdom of this policy. Many individuals maintain meaningful connections to more than one state. The global trend toward acknowledging this reality through acceptance of multiple c...

The author explores Michael Trebilcock’s “The Law and Economics of Immigration Policy” as an opportunity to reflect on the capacity of broadly conceived, transnational policy prescriptions to contend with the complexity of migration as a global phenomenon, the specificity of national contexts, and the limits on state actors’ ability to socially eng...

The first part of this chapter provides an historical overview of the Canadian asylum process. The second part explores how international and constitutional law structures shapes and constrains asylum law in Canada. The next two sections discuss elements of the asylum regime through an enlarged conception of the right to be heard. In its traditiona...

This paper surveys the international legal frameworks, including the many guidelines, handbooks, resolutions, toolkits, conclusions and manuals produced by various United Nations bodies, that confirm an awareness of the protection issues specific to women and girls displaced by conflict. It explores the extent to which these documents address the g...

Attention has turned recently to the human rights implications of Western states' cooperation with the United States in the so-called War on Terror. This paper presents the ordeal of Canadian Maher Arar as a case-study in how one state responded to contentions of complicity in the extraordinary rendition of one of its nationals. Relying in part on...

This paper surveys the international legal frameworks, including the many guidelines, handbooks, resolutions, toolkits, conclusions and manuals produced by various United Nations bodies, that confirm an awareness of the protection issues specific to women and girls displaced by conflict. It explores the extent to which these documents address the g...

The securitization of immigration prioritizes the goal of protecting the body politic from infection by the menacing foreigner. The securitization of legal citizenship complements this process by facilitating the discursive and sometimes literal mutation of the citizen into the foreigner. Investing in mechanisms that enable the conversion or revers...

The objective of this Article is to integrate legal and social conceptions of citizenship as they materialize at the geographic, political, and social border crossings that accompany transnational mobility. Rather than pose the question 'who is the citizen?', I ask 'who is the citizen's Other?', partly as a means of surfacing what we mean by citize...

This article analyzes a Canadian immigration program that authorizes issuance of temporary work visas to ‘exotic dancers.’ In response to public criticism that the government was thereby implicated in the transnational trafficking of women into sexual exploitation, Citizenship and Immigration Canada retained the visa program de jure but eliminated...

Refugees are vanishing from the territory of wealthy industrialized nations. I do not mean that refugees are literally disappearing. Despite the best efforts of western governments to deter them, thousands of asylum seekers do manage to arrive and lodge refugee claims each year. I refer here not to the legal and material reality of refugees, but ra...

This chapter uses the case of the Canadian company, Talisman Energy Inc., which operated until recently in South Sudan, to examine the impact of global capital investment on human displacement. It describes how security has been redefined as the protection of oil company stock prices. The ways in which women have been influenced by the precipitous...

Immigration laws and policies articulate global supply with local demand by delimiting the terms of entry, duration and residence. In the case of sex-trade workers, the formal stance of most wealthy states tends toward exclusion of non-citizens and criminalization of prostitution. The result is that foreign women who engage enter and work without l...

The Canadian government has used 9/11 and the consequential focus on security as a cover for negotiating an agreement with the United States which would deflect Canada-bound asylum seekers who pass through the United States. Is this agreement really about security? If not, what is the agreement about? The paper assesses the likely impact of the agr...

The author explores linkages between the transnational activities of a Canadian oil company operating in Sudan and the human rights and humanitarian violations committed by the Government of Sudan against the people of Southern Sudan in the course of the ongoing civil war. The specific impact of the armed conflict on women is recounted in microcosm...

This project triangulates the governance relationships between Canada, Canadian corporate citizens operating transnationally in conflict zones, and citizens of the host countries. We examine the human rights implications of militarized commerce and advocate state accountability for regulating the activities of transnational enterprises (TNEs) and d...

In Suresh v. Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and Ahani v. MCI, the Supreme Court of Canada declared that removing a refugee accused of terrorism to a country where he or she would face a substantial risk of torture or similar abuse would virtually always violate the individual’s rights under s. 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedo...

The author argues that the attack on September 11 and the legislative response to it by Canada, (and, by extension, other Western states) reveal how the functionality of borders is simultaneously overdetermined and crucially undermined by the quest for security. The fixation on border permeability as the primary determinant of security from the thr...

Human Rights Quarterly 17.2 (1995) 213-277 --James Hathaway --Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas On March 9, 1993, Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) issued guidelines entitled "Women Refugee Claimants Fearing Gender-Related Persecution" (hereinafter Guidelines). The purpose of the Guidelines is to provide IRB decisionmakers with a means of in...

The Supreme Court of Canada's recent judgment in Canada (Attorney-General) v. Ward considers various aspects of the international Convention refugee definition. The claimant fled Northern Ireland to escape retaliation by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) for his effective defection from that organization. The Ward judgment reinforces the po...

This comment examines the deductibility of child care costs as a business expense. The taxpayer, a female lawyer, argued for an interpretation of the Income Tax Act that would allow such a deduction and argued further that its denial violated the equality guarantee of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The author contends that the statutory interp...

Canadians often associate indentured labour with a remote past, and a racially stratified labour market with the legacy of slavery and colonization in other countries. The existence of a Canadian immigration scheme known as the Foreign Domestic Movement (FDM) program challenges this naive complacency and raises the possibility that these phenomena...

The salient issue for most human rights activists working from within the communities where female genital mutilation (FGM) has been prevalent is not whether, but how, to eradicate the practice. This essay focuses on policies adopted in one country of immigration – Canada – in order to explore the complex positioning of women within diasporic commu...

The authors argue that states were historically less bordered and self-contained than public opinion and the scholarship oriented around the nation-state have assumed. First, the authors address the permeability of borders in the period of mass migration at the turn to the 20th century, taking as examples migrants to Canada from Europe, China, and...

The demise of the Law Reform Commission of Canada (LRCC) presents an opportunity to rethink the scope and legitimacy of law reform as it has been conceptualized and practiced by academic lawyers. This article suggests that while the LRCC aspired to be a disinterested independent agency promoting a neutral brand of reform, it could not avoid behavin...

Migration law asks three questions: Who gets in? On what terms? Who decides who gets in? In Canadian jurisprudence, the answers to these questions once depended on the interaction of domestic administrative case law with Canada’s international human rights obligations. With the advent of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a triangular rel...

Citation by one national court of another state’s jurisprudence or legislation has attracted much attention recently, especially in relation to the interpretation and application of constitutional and international human rights norms. Commentators document these practices, judges extol or deride them, and academics theorise about them. A commonly s...

This work was prepared as part of the EU–Canada project - The Changing Landscape of Justice and Home Affairs Cooperation in the European Union and EU-Canada Relations – funded by the European Commission, Directorate-General for External Relations, Relations with the US and Canada. This project assesses the relations between the European Union (EU)...