Date: 20040521
Docket: IMM-2517-03
Citation: 2004 FC 719
Ottawa, Ontario, May 21, 2004
Present: THE HONOURABLE MR. JUSTICE BEAUDRY
BETWEEN:
PAL SZABADOS
Applicant
and
THE MINISTER OF CITIZENSHIP
AND IMMIGRATION
Respondent
REASONS FOR ORDER AND ORDER
[1] The Applicant is seeking a judicial review of a decision of the Refugee Protection Division of the Immigration and Refugee Board (Board), reasons dated February 17, 2003. In that decision, the Board found the Applicant not to be a Convention refugee nor a person in need of protection.
ISSUES
[2] The Applicant raises two issues:
1. Did the Board err by not considering the cumulative effect of the discrimination against the Applicant?
2. Did the Board err when it concluded the Applicant could have sought State protection from future attacks?
[3] For the reasons below, I answer the first question in the negative and do not need to answer the second one. Therefore, this application will be dismissed.
FACTS
[4] A Hungarian citizen, the Applicant claims to have a well-founded fear of persecution because of his membership in a particular social group, namely as a homosexual. The Board summarized the facts as follows. The Applicant lived in Gyor, a town of about 130,000 people near the Slovakian border. The watchmaker he apprenticed with fired him because he was gay. When his parents learned he was gay, they evicted him from their home. He eventually found work as a watchmaker but his employer fired him when he found out he was gay. The Applicant was essentially blacklisted in his field of employment and was only able to find casual and temporary work. The Applicant and his partner lived together but carried out their relationship discreetly. Their neighbours harassed and persecuted them, threatening to kill them if they did not leave the neighbourhood.
[5] In 1996, anti-gay people beat the Applicant, breaking his nose and causing bruises all over. The Applicant later lived several months in Komarno, a small border town in Slovakia. During a gay crackdown there, the police detained him, beat him ant threatened him with death if he returned. Subsequently, the Applicant and his partner lived with the Applicant's grandmother on the outskirts of Gyor. The local police pressured his grandmother to remove him from her home. According to the Applicant, people in Hungary do not want him around because he looks gay and were he to return, the same people who beat him before would kill or cripple him.
CONTESTED DECISION
[6] The Board accepted the Applicant to be gay and acknowledged that discrimination against gays is a problem in Hungary. However, the Board found that there was not a serious possibility of persecution or a risk to life or risk of cruel and unusual treatment. The Board reviewed extensively the documentary evidence concerning the frequency and the likelihood of persecution of gay persons in Hungary, thereby analyzing the objective fear of persecution. It found that there was legislation and organizations aimed at protecting homosexual people, and that differentiations on the basis of age, employment and adoption restrictions were not sufficiently serious violations of human rights to amount to persecution.
ANALYSIS
[7] On a procedural note, the Applicant is asking this Court to allow the hearing of this application despite its late filing. The Respondent does not oppose this request and I am prepared to grant this extension of time.
[8] The cumulative effect of the discrimination is clearly a question of facts, which means this Court will only interfere with the Board's decision if its decision is patently unreasonable.
[9] The Applicant argues that the Board did not consider the cumulative effect of discrimination against him. He, however, failed to bolster this argument by references to the Board's decision or to specify what, in the facts, had a cumulative discriminatory effect. It should also be noted that the Board did not have to explicitly state that it dealt with the cumulative effect of the evidence. That is what McKeown J. stated in Lo v. Canada (Minister of Employment and Immigration), [1994] F.C.J. No. 905, paragraph 5 (T.D.) (QL):
In my view, although the Board does not state that it dealt with the cumulative effect of the evidence, it did so by implication. There is no doubt that this applicant has suffered discrimination and harassment in the PRC as a result of her "bad family background", as viewed by the authorities in the PRC. However, the documentary evidence with respect to the lack of objective prospective fear of persecution is very strong. In reviewing the evidence as a whole, the finding that the applicant did not have an objectively well founded fear of persecution is not patently unreasonable.
[10] Like in the Lo decision, the documentary evidence in the present case strongly indicated that there was no objective fear of persecution for homosexuals in Hungary. The documentary evidence established that gays are discriminated against but not persecuted. The absence of objective fear of persecution is fatal to a refugee claim. Without it, a person cannot be granted a refugee status. Therefore, there is no need to analyze the second question the Applicant put forward, namely State protection.
[11] I cannot come to the conclusion that the Board made a patently unreasonable error in finding that the documentary evidence did not support an objective fear of persecution.
[12] This application is dismissed.
[13] Neither counsel recommended certification of a question of general importance. No question will be certified.
ORDER
THIS COURT ORDERS that this application is dismissed. No question of general importance is certified.
"Michel Beaudry"
Judge
FEDERAL COURT
SOLICITORS OF RECORD
DOCKET: IMM-2517-03
STYLE OF CAUSE: PAL SZABADOS v.
MINISTER OF CITIZENSHIP AND
IMMIGRATION
PLACE OF HEARING: Toronto, Ontario
DATE OF HEARING: April 28, 2004
REASONS FOR ORDER
AND ORDER BY: THE HONOURABLE MR. JUSTICE BEAUDRY
DATED: May 21, 2004
APPEARANCES:
Shane Watson FOR THE APPLICANT
Tamrat Gebeyehu FOR THE RESPONDENT
SOLICITORS OF RECORD:
Shane Watson
Burlington, Ontario FOR THE APPLICANT
Morris A. Rosenberg
Deputy Attorney General of Canada
Toronto, Ontario FOR THE RESPONDENT