Asylum plea of Punjab woman with ‘Khalistan links’ rejected in Canada

TOronto: A canadian river federal soldier margaret court has dismissed an invoke by amerindic national, Kanwaljit Kaur, who sought to remain in Canada by claiming she would face persecution if returned to India due to her support for the Khalistan movement and her association with the banned group Sikhs for Justice (SFJ).In a ruling, federal justice Guy Regimbald disagreed with the applicant, Kanwaljit Kaur’s, assertion that she risked “persecution, and consequently irreparable harm will occur, because of her involvement with Sikhs for Justice and her support for the Khalistan movement”.In the judicial review of a negative decision on her Pre-Removal Risk Assessment (PRRA), the judge said the claims were “speculative” and that having a voting card for the so-called Khalistan Referendum was “insufficient to establish” she had “a sufficiently high profile to make her a person of interest for the Indian authorities”.The ruling was delivered on August 27 in Vancouver, British Columbia.Kaur arrived in Canada in February 2018 and claimed refugee protection, more than one year later, in September 2019. She originally claimed it was on the grounds of fear of her “abusive husband”.The court ordered that a motion for a stay of removal was dismissed.Just two days before this order, a Federal Court upheld decisions to deny asylum claims filed by an Indian couple on the grounds that their argument that they faced persecution if they returned to their home country due to their pro-Khalistan activity in Canada was “disingenuous”.In a judgment on August 25 in Montreal, Federal judge Benoit M Duchesne deemed “reasonable” the previous decisions taken by the Refugee Board of Canada’s Refugee Appeal Division (RAD) on February 15, 2024, and IRB’s Refugee Protection Division or RPD three months earlier.The principal applicant 38-year-old Amandeep Singh and the associate applicant 32-year-old Kanwaldeep Kaur had amended their original application before the RPD hearing to state they “had become supporters of Khalistan during their time in Canada and will be persecuted as a result of their new political activities if they are returned to India. They added protest photos and Punjab Referendum Khalistan voter registration cards issued by Sikhs for Justice,” the judgment noted.The RPD had found that the chronology of Singh’s “stated interest and participation in the independent Khalistan movement underscored a lack of genuineness in the movement itself”.The RAD agreed that the RPD qualified the claim as “disingenuous and lacking good faith”. Those decisions were validated by the Federal court.