Exiled Libyan family on tenterhooks as Canada decides their future

The case was raised in the Canadian parliament after newspaper The Star carried an interview with the Benhmuda family about their tragic ordeal.

The family was deported from Canada back to Libya after living there for eight years: even though the two youngest boys, Adam and Omar, are Canadian citizens by birth.

Adel Benhmuda, now 43, told The Star that upon his return to Tripoli’s airport and taken to the notorious Ain Zara prison on the outskirts of the Libyan capital. For a total of six months, during two separate periods of detention, he says he was repeatedly beaten.

Guards would drag him from his dark cell to a nearby room. They would bind his bare feet, string them up in the air and beat the soles with batons and thick electrical wires.

Following the interview the plight of the Benhmuda was raised by Don Davies, a New Democrat MP, who asked Kenney when he would “bring these Canadian children, and their family, back to Canada where they belong.”

“No Canadian government of any political stripe deports people to torture,” he said, adding, “This is a particularly complicated case… I cannot comment on the details because of the Privacy Act. But if we receive an application from that family I can assure the House that it will be given every humanitarian consideration, and indeed dealt with on an accelerated basis.”

The Benhmudas have now been mailed an application to enter the country as sponsored refugees.

The family and are now living in a flat in St Paul’s Bay after being granted protection by the Maltese authorities.

After denying them asylum, the Canadian authorities had concluded that it was safe to return the Benhmudas to Libya, a country that Canadian and NATO warplanes now bomb to get rid of Gaddafi.

From Libya to Canada

Benhmuda says he fled Libya because he was repeated picked up and roughly questioned by police from 1990 to 2000. Police wanted information about his younger brother, who had fled the country and was a member of a militant group determined to overthrow Ghaddafi.

Benhmuda fled by paying smuggler about $2,000 for student visas to Canada. He sold his home and car and flew his family to Toronto, claiming refugee status upon arrival at Pearson airport.

The family spent eight years living in Toronto and Mississauga. Benhmuda juggled two jobs, by day working in a shop that made eyeglasses, by night driving a truck.

The children, now aged 16 to eight, did well in school. Two were under regular medical care, one suffering from muscular dystrophy, the other form asthma. Aisha also gave birth to two more children — Omar in October 2000 and Adam in July 2002. But in 2003 the Benhmudas were denied refugee status as the adjudicators stated they didn’t believe he was interrogated by Libyan police even if they had evidence suggesting that by that time, Benhmuda’s younger brother was back in Libya and in prison.

In June 2008, a “pre-removal risk assessment” by the immigration department concluded the Benhmudas did not risk persecution or torture if deported to Gaddafi’s Libya.

The Canadian Border Services Agency gave the family three weeks to leave Canada.

Deported to Libya

The family landed in Tripoli in 2008. Benhmuda was detained, and for four months Aisha received no official word of her husband.

“During the first few days, (Benhmuda) was beaten every day,” according to the UNHCR’s February, request for resettlement to Canadian authorities, which cites the whipping of his feet.

The family sold more gold and paid $8,000 to a relative with a contact in the police force. He got them Benhmuda’s passport and visas for travel to Europe.

Escape to Malta

In January 2010, he landed with his family in Stockholm. After six months they were sent to Malta because the European visa had been issued by the Maltese embassy in Tripoli. Swedish authorities told them that meant they would have to apply for asylum in Malta.

The Benhmuda family spent nine months in the Hal Far camp. At that time they were the only family at the camp. Omar, who was nine at the time, cried constantly. “I have never seen rats that big,” Aisha recalls. “The cats were afraid of the rats.”

After being granted protection by the Maltese authorities they moved to a furnished two-bedroom apartment in St. Paul’s Bay. They pay $355 a month, plus utilities.

After being granted protection in Malta, in February, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees formally asked Canada to resettle the Benhmudas.

But Canadian immigration authorities seem reluctant, suggesting in one email that they owe the family nothing.

The four boys now sleep on mattresses on the floor in one room. Benhmuda hasn’t been able to find a job. He claims that construction work is available, but he says his diabetes and high blood pressure rule that out. He also believes he missed out on at least one job because of xenophobia.

In September 2010, the Benhmudas’ Toronto lawyer, Andrew Brouwer, asked Canadian immigration officials to allow the family back into the country on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.

Brouwer argues the Canadian government effectively deported two Canadian citizens - Omar and Adam - “to one of the most repressive countries on the planet,” forcing them to deal with the traumatic arrest and torture of their father.

The immigration department referred the UNHCR request to officials in Canada’s embassy in Rome. The reaction so far doesn’t give the Benhmudas much hope.

A March 21 email from Laurent Beaulieu, the embassy’s immigration counsellor finds it “odd” that UNHCR would make the Benhmudas a priority when they’ve already been resettled by Maltese authorities and “there are so many other urgent cases due to the crisis in the Magreb.”

The UNHCR describes the island of 400,000 as under increasing pressure from African migrants and refugees landing on its shores. The country has no refugee integration policy, and racism creates “an environment of fear, tension and mistrust.”

The UNHCR request ends by reminding the Canadian government of the Canadian citizenship of Omar and Adam, “as well as the whole family’s close links with Canada.”