A day after Leo Mugesera’s deportation another Genocide suspect based in Canada Jean Leonard Teganya is in legal battle pleading for mercy not to be deported.
This was after a Federal Court judge questioned his fate if returned to his homeland.
He is believed to have facilitated militias to kill nearly 200 Tutsi at Butare University Hospital where he was interning as a medical student.
But for Teganya, this is only the beginning of his fight to remain in Canada with his wife and children.
He has made repeated appeals to the Federal Court of Canada.
He won a new hearing in 2003, but the panel eventually came to the same conclusion. That, too, was appealed, but the Federal Court sided with the IRB.
A subsequent appeal was turned down.
He then applied for a Pre-Removal Risk Assessment, a way Canada determines if someone being deported is in danger in his or her homeland.
He was cleared for removal but appealed, saying his father was imprisoned for 11 years without charge because he was suspected to have been involved in the genocide.
He said he would suffer the same fate.
The government found he could be safely deported to Rwanda. He appealed but lost. He submitted a second pre-removal assessment, claiming that media coverage of his case had put him in even more jeopardy.
After he was ordered to be deported for complicity, a newspaper in Rwanda asked prosecutor General Martin Ngoga about the case.
“Much as it is a matter still within Canadian jurisdiction, and subject to further appeal, it is a positive step in our collective endeavour as community of nations to deal with every detail that would help bring perpetrators of genocide to justice and deny them safe haven anywhere in the world,” Ngoga said.
However, Teganya said that even though there was no evidence he would not receive a fair trial in Rwanda. Also, his father had since been sentenced to 22 years in prison.
The Canadian government dismissed the complaint and cleared him for deportation and, once again, Teganya turned to the Federal Court to intervene.
In a decision published yesterday (Monday), Justice Roger T. Hughes agreed with Teganya that officials did not adequately appraise his evidence of fear.
“Rarely does one see in cases of this kind such clear evidence of risk personally directed against an applicant,” Justice Hughes wrote.
“The officer appears to have been doggedly determined to find reasons, however slight, to dismiss or give little weight to these documents [evidence presented by Mr. Teganya] instead of considering what evidence and expert opinions they do present and giving proper weight to them,” he ruled.
“He feared returning to Rwanda, believing that he, as the son of his father who was convicted, would be arrested and, even if ultimately tried and found not to be guilty, the period of imprisonment before trial, which he believed may be a long period, would, in his belief subject him to torture and punishment,” Justice Hughes wrote.
He ordered the government to assign a new officer to rehear Mr. Teganya’s pre-removal risk assessment arguments.
Mr. Teganya’s lawyer, Jacqueline Swaisland, said: “Unfortunately, the finding in Mr. Teganya’s case that the government official who reviewed his file was ‘doggedly determined’ to find reasons to dismiss the exhaustive documentation presented by Mr. Teganya seems to be an all too common phenomena in the Canadian immigration system.”
The court has evidence of lists containing names of patients and staff targeted to be killed, the prosecution believes he wrote the names which also led to patients being turned away to face death by marauding militiamen.
After fleeing Rwanda during the end of the worst of the killing — in 100 days extremists from the Hutu majority killed more than a million minority Tutsi. Teganya went to exile in several countries such as Zaire, Kenya and India before settling in Canada in 1999.
He claimed asylum, saying his Hutu background saved him from death but the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) determined he was ineligible for refugee status as someone believed to be complicit in crimes against humanity or war crimes.
The IRB questioned why he survived and stayed at the hospital. He replied he was determined to complete his internship.
“This justification is not reasonable in the context of the Rwandan horror,” the IRB found. “Although he claims that he did not participate actively in the massacres, the panel … is entitled to ask itself whether the claimant’s passivity in the face of the massacres is not equivalent to endorsing the policies and methods of the party in power.
“The panel is entitled to ask itself why the presence of the claimant on the campus did not seem to concern the extremists, who pursued their dirty work for several weeks.”
Teganya’s father was a regional leader in the Hutu-led governing Mouvement Révolutionaire National pours le Développement, the party in power at the time of the genocide, court heard.
ENDS
