In a damning decision by a federal tribunal, a refugee judge has been criticized for having “a predisposition” against Roma claimants from Romania.
In an April ruling, the refugee appeal tribunal, a division of the Immigration and Refugee Board, quashed a decision by David Mungovan to reject a Roma couple who had sought asylum in Canada. Arnold Sincu and Diana Ancuta Gramnea claimed they were persecuted and discriminated in Romania due to their ethnicity.
The tribunal not only set Mungovan’s decision aside but accepted Sincu’s and Gramnea’s asylum claim and granted them protection in Canada. Sincu and Gramnea declined an interview request by the Star but their lawyer, Peter Ivanyi, said Bobkin going out of her way to review other Roma cases handled by Mungovan is unprecedented.
The yearly number of asylum claims from Romania, almost all by Roma minorities, has shot up from zero in 2017 to 1,366 in 2018 before coming down to 131 and 109 in the past two years due to the pandemic. Of the 500 Romanian Roma claims heard by the refugee board between 2018 and 2021, 72 per cent were granted.
Not all instances of abrupt, impatient or challenging tone will amount to bias, but the tribunal found Mungovan crossing that line after reviewing the recording of Sincu’s and Gramnea’s 2021 refugee hearing. In all five refugee refusals under review, for instance, the refugee judge opened the decisions stating: “The claimant/s fear/s that if she/they were to return to Romania she/they would not get the same health care as Canada offers.” But he ignored the actual allegations raised in each individual case — in Sincu’s and Gramnea’s case, their complaint was about having to pay extra fees or bribes to receive health care in Romania, and being refused care when unable to pay.
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