Immigration detention system is legal, though not always applied perfectly: judge
A Federal Court judge says Canada’s rules for detaining some foreigners who can’t be deported quickly are constitutional though they may not always be applied perfectly.
Judge Simon Fothergill says there are mechanisms built into the law to allow detainees to challenge their detention and the conditions in which they are held, which is enough to make the system constitutional.
In a decision released Tuesday, Fothergill said that if those standards are sometimes not met, “this is a problem of maladministration, not an indication that the statutory scheme is itself unconstitutional.”
The constitutional challenge was filed by Alvin Brown, a Jamaican man who was detained for five years before being deported last year.