Suchergebnisse

Book review

AbstractThe United Nations (UN) human rights treaty bodies play an important role in defining the scope and the nature of non-citizens' rights. This article offers a critical overview of the UN human rights case law from 2008 to 2018 pertaining to non-citizens — notably undocumented migrants, refused asylum seekers, and permanent residents ordered deported — in Canada. It examines the jurisprudence of the three UN human rights treaty bodies recognized by Canada as having competence to receive and consider individual complaints — namely, the UN Human Rights Committee, the Committee against Torture, and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. The purpose of this examination is two-fold. First, it intends to foster a better understanding of the cases lodged by non-citizens before the UN human rights treaty bodies. The second aim is to explore the substantive issues that the UN committees' jurisprudence on non-citizens reveals about Canada's immigration decision-making and enforcement. It is argued that some groups of non-citizens in Canada are at risk of being deported to persecution or hardship in violation of the non-refoulement principle and Canada's international human rights obligations. The article illuminates several loopholes identified by the UN treaty bodies in Canada's immigration and refugee protection system that heighten the risk of refoulement.

While prison needle exchange programs, or prison needle and syringe programs, have existed in different parts of the world since the 1990s, little is known about how currently incarcerated people perceive them—particularly in Canada, where such programs have only recently been implemented. This study explores incarcerated women's perceptions of a recently implemented prison needle exchange program using in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews with 56 federally incarcerated women in Western Canada. In particular, we explore the barriers that women perceive in accessing the prison needle exchange program. These perceived barriers contributed to our participants' negative views of the prison needle exchange program as well as their overwhelming lack of support for its implementation. Our participants felt that the prison needle exchange program acts as an obstacle to sobriety and could increase different types of harm—including encouraging injection drug use and contributing to overdoses—within the prison. Participants also identified other barriers to using the prison needle exchange program, including a perceived lack of confidentiality/anonymity for users of the program and that the prison needle exchange program itself is structurally incompatible with the rules and operations of a prison system that continues to criminalize drugs. Using an implementation science framework, we argue that this situation accentuates the need for significant consultations with incarcerated people about the operation of such programs, and for funds to support other programs that target participant-identified root causes of substance misuse, such as programs that address past trauma and victimization. At the same time, we caution that some barriers may be inherent in how prisons are structured.