Canada and Michael Mvogo

Michael Mvogo: Canada would clearly not welcome Mvogo if that is his real name under normal circumstances. He arrived here in 2005 with a fraudulent American passport and only revealed what he now claims to be his true identity in 2011. The U.S., Haiti and Guinea have all refused to receive him. And the reliability of even his most recent story is dubious. He now claims to hail from Cameroon, but that country denies having any record of him, according to The Star. Mvogo is among the longest-serving of the roughly 600 people living in similar extra-legal limbo in this country on any given day. These cases are not simple. Immigration officials must be given the time to investigate thoroughly each case. And the policy should deter others from trying to short-circuit the immigration and refugee system and thus compromise security and undermine the fairness of the process and Living in a free and democratic society entails some degree of uncomfortable risk and unsettling ambiguity. That is the implicit assumption underlying the United Nations call for the immediate release of Michael Mvogo, a man who has been held in an Ontario jail for eight years because immigration officials cannot determine who he is or where he comes from and therefore how to deport him. The problem, as the UN points out, is that the alternative to releasing him Canadas official policy of indefinite incarceration amounts to a human rights violation. The inability of a state party to carry out the expulsion of an individual . . . under no circumstances justifies indefinite detention, said the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions, before urging Canada to join several other countries in establishing a 90-day limit on such lock-ups. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.