In June 2000 we saw Roma families from Zárnoly, then in December further Roma fami-lies from Mosonmagyaróvár, Veszprém and Battonya, boarding buses headed for the West, in the hope of starting a new life somewhere else under conditions of legal and financial security. The silent majority of emigrants, however, do not choose Europe as a new place of abode. By the end of the year, the number of would-be emigrants addressing Canadian immigration officers with "I'm a refugee", the words which meant admission into the coun-try, had reached an average of ten a day. Between January and September 2000 Canadian authorities found 228 applications for refugee status submitted by Roma well-founded enough to confer rights to refugee status because of the applicants' fear of persecution in Hungary. The sight of a continuous stream of Roma fleeing the country can now be set beside the view of the famous Chain Bridge illuminated by night lights, and the sight of impressi ve industrial parks in the official tabloid image of the country.
"It's got to go through" - Maria whispers anxiously as we walk back into the court room. It takes us rather a long search to find the room we need among the great number of identical-looking plasterboarded rooms along the corridors on the umpteenth floor of the Immigration and Refugee Board, housed in the Toronto government building. The corri-dors and lounges are filled with refugees from ali fo ur corners of the world, interpreters, attomeys and board members. Some of them are looking for the rooms in which they are supposed to deli ver their next decisions, some of them for the room in which they will be decided about. The break is over and Maria's hearing, for which she has been waiting for half a year, is about to be resumed. What is to be decided is the crucial question whether she will get refugee status and the immigration visa. I do not have the heart to tell her the sobering news which I have just received from her legal representative: the Iikelihood of her success in convincing the two-strong committee is very slim because she has "a very thin story" and no evidence.
Before the break, Maria (who asked to keep her real name secret) told me that she used to work at the Internal Medicine Ward of a hospital in the country but her situation be-carne more and more untenable. There were continuous protests from patients objecting to a gypsy nurse administering injections and drugs to them. They were afraid she might want to harm them. She telis me there were never any objections to the way she did her
I This article was published inÉlet és irodalom (Life and Literature), January 19,2001.
job. Her bosses had defended her or some time, but when several new nurses carne to the hospital at the same time, the air around her soon grew thin. After some time the matron asked her to leave, saying her presence was undermining the reputation of the hospital.
Maria told her she was considering making a complaint at the hospital director. In response to this, the matron threatened her with a disciplinary dismissal, to which Maria, a young woman who is somewhat ignorant of the intricacies of labour law but with a sense of pride and dignity, responded by never going to work again. As a result of this, she has no papers, i.e. evidence of the way in which her employment carne to be terminated.
During the break Lisa Winter-Card, the young attorney who represents Maria, told us that al most ali Hungarian applicants try to support their application by c1aiming that they are Roma who have experienced persecution at home. She thinks there are several prob-lems with Maria's case. Maria made no attempt to fight for her rights, and one of the crucial questions to be scrutinised in the course of the refugee procedure in Canada is the question whether or not the applicant tried to take recourse to ali the legal remedies avail-able in his or her country. Whether the case of persecution is supported by straightforward evidence is the key consideration in the decision about applications. Persecution is de-fined not only as undue restrietion of a normal existence imposed by government institu-tions but also as the lack of governmental protectionagainst discrimination on the part of local majority society and the impossibility of availing oneself of legal redress for per-sonal grievances. The fact that Maria did not wait until she was dismissed, failed to seek redress at a labour court and made no attempt to find employment in another hospital weakens her case. At the same time Winter-Card is aware of the fact that the anti-Roma attitude is fairly evenly spread throughout Hungary and that, as a result, Maria was un-Iikely to be accepted by other hospitals. In fact, she was going to use this fact in her ar-gument during the procedure which would follow the break.
Most Hungarian refugees arrive at the hearing much better prepared th an Maria was.
They try not only to document their personal grievances but also mention the general tendency to denigrate Roma and particular instances of discrimination. Most of them com-plain about the breaches of law committed by the police and local authorities, the segre-gation in neighbourhoods, the discrimination at work and the antipathy, hatred and racism on the part of the majority population. Attorneys and legal aid agencies in Toronto keep records of several cases which have never been revealed to Hungarian legal defence organi-sations. The Hungarian file at the research unit of the IRB has been continuously updating its Hungarian file, with special attention and care since January 2000. Within the short span of time between January and November 2000, Hungary carne to rank third after Pakistan and Sri Lanka in the number of refugees arriving in Canada. Most of them were children and young persons, and there were over twice as many below thirty than above.
Aceording to data published by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship of Canada, a monthly average of 135 applications for refugee status were submitted by Hungarian citizens until August, but their numbers soared to 290 a month before November was over.
In other words, an average of ten Hungarians were seeking refugee status wi th Canadian authorities every day, with 1884 Hungarian applications registered between January and late November.
The sudden increase in the number of refugees seems to be the latest chapter in the history of a process which has lasted several years, rather than a work of mere chance.
There was a sense that Canadian authorities might be considering the introduction of administrative restrictions as a result of the increasing number of refugee applications from Hungary as early as 1998. It would have been reasonable for Ottawa to re-introduce the compulsory visa system as it did in response to the sudden increase in Roma migration from the Czech Republic. But the step was not taken, presumably as a result of the Iively economic relations between the two countries and of Canadian respect for the interests of the influential Hungarian community in Canada. What happened instead was and has ever since been unique in the history of Canadian immigration policy: two families were cho-sen for 'lead cases' , with witnesses summoned from Hungary in November 1998. IRB spokesman Phil ip Palmer says the arrangement of lead cases was a result of a long proc-ess and was designed both to make work simpier and easier for committee members - so that they would not have to go through the details of the situation in Hungary in each individual instance - and to 'establish legal trends'.
Following a hearing of the Hungarian witnesses (András Biró, human rights activist;
Flórián Farkas, President of the National Gypsy Self-Government; Lipót Höltzl, then under-secretary of the Ministry of Justice; and Jenő Kaltenbach minority ombudsman) the applications of the 'model families' were rejected in January 1999. This was followed by a sharp decline in the number of applications which were found well-supported and granted. While in 1998 Canadian authorities found claims of persecution sufficiently sup-ported by evidence in 153 out of217 applications assessed, the records for 1999 reveal 74 positive decisions out of 448 cases.
A number of attomeys dealing with Hungarian refugees maintained that IRB was not entitled to arrange for lead cases. Lisa Winter-Court told us that, unlike the Canadian legal system, the refugee procedure is not based on precedent, as a result of which it was not legitimate to refer to previous cases when adjudicating about a case in hand. "It was unfair to set up the lead cases", she complains, "because the families' representatives lacked sufficient resources to call witnesses." Rosco Galati, another attomey from Toronto, thinks the fact that the arbitrators (committee members) appointed for the pre-seleeted lead cases had no experience in Hungarian cases clearly indicates that the two lead cases were a mere show. IRB spokesman Philip Palmer claims the selection of members with no experience in Hungarian matters was designed exactly to free judgement in the cases of any bias that might result from previous experience. He added that the applicants had als o be en entitled to call witnesses, but, as it happened, not all of the witnesses called did, in fact, tum up.
Rosco Galati went further than complaining: he lodged an appeal against the lead cases in which he requested that they should be abrogated. After the Federal Court allowed the ap-peal to be submitted in March 2000, Galati went on to sue the Federal Govemment. He made the following passionate statement in his Toronto office: "1 will sue the government and IRB in the name of a group for a crime against humanity. The same applies to the Hungarian officials who would deserve to be put to jail for giving a distorted description of the Hungarian situation in their testimonies. One has to be in a coma to fail to see the problems the Roma are facing in Hungary." After sending out subpoenas to the adminis-trators who made the arrangements for the lead cases, a general state of panic broke out at IRB, he claims.
The attomeys think the new tum of the tide in the adjudication of Hungarian applica-tions was a direct result of these subpoenas. In early July, 2000 a family of seven were
granted refugee status in Toronto. What makes their case unique is the fact that while in the previous period positive decisions - or at least those that became public - were made in cases involving personal insult to the applicants backed by straightforward evidence, this family complained of the general situation. Yasmeen Siddiqui, a member of the com-mittee, took the pains to do what no one had done for one and a half years: he examined, item by item, the observance of human rights in Hungary. In his argument for the decision he maintained that new and convincing evidence had come to light since the conclusion of the lead cases, which made it seem very likely that applicants who had been staying in Canada since 1997 would be exposed to further persecution if they returned to Hungary.
The decision made in July can now be seen to have acted as another 'lead case': the num-ber of applications ending with a positive decision has risen again significantly, with 91 positive decisions out of 568 applications (16%) from January to late June as opposed to 137 out of 290 between July and September (47%). Now apparently on the increase, this tendency toward admission is likely to stimulate the emigration wave which can be ex-pected in the autumn.
The emigration wave, by now a true exodus, is perhaps the most desperate manifesta-tion of the frustramanifesta-tion which has accumulated in the Roma population in the past few decades as a result of their unwanted status of the outcast and the ignored. In Canada, as opposed to Hungary, there is hardly a trace of an anti-gypsy attitude. There are jobs for everyone and liberal refugee regulations which allow even applicants with a rejected appli-cation to stay on and work for one and a half or two years. Of course, the exorbitant air fare reduces the numbers from, or rather before, the start: Roma at the poorer end of the income scale, poorly informed and mostly living in the country can only target the European Union, a destination which is not particularly friendly to refugees, while Canada remains a realistic destination only for the Roma who have some savings, are better informed -typicaIly the musician gypsies and their families. An emigration fever has broken out among young urban gypsies with no strong attachments to the place where they live, fuelled - as conversations reveal - to varying degrees by bitterness about their fate as weil as curiosity.
With no systematic research to date, no one knows the personal and communal grievances and motivations behind the tendency for emigration. That there are such motives and grievances and that they are strong can be read off the numbers.
At the trial, the Hungarian refugees who claim to be Roma have to pro ve three things:
that they are of gypsy origins, that they are trustworthy and that their grievances qualify as persecution. The attorneys confirm the fact the refugees complain about: there are many people who are not Roma but pretend to be with reference to make-believe stories of perse-cution, and are accorded refugee status. The right to a free choice of identity is among the fundamental rights secured by the Hungarian Constitution but a gypsy exposed to perse-cution can only be one who is treated as a gypsy by the majority population. If an appli-cant does not look a Roma, he or she is likely to be less exposed to insults and atrocities in Hungary, so the weight of his or her application and trustworthiness is impaired.
Seeing the colour of Maria's skin I had not expected any doubts to be entertained about her origins, yet the committee takes nothing for granted. Maria has to answer a lot of questions. How do Hungarians recognise her as a gypsy? What language did they speak at home? What did her parents and grandparents do for a living? Where do they keep her father's violin? What Roma groups live in Hungary? Maria does her best to answer every
question patiently, but the questioners have difficulties in understanding. which is made worse by occasional mistranslations on the interpreter's part. Slowly but perhaps inevita-bly Maria becomes impatient. She does not understand why she has to explain for the fifth time that she is recognised in Hungary as a gypsy firstly because her skin is dark and secondly, because she speaks Hungarian. This immediately makes the committee think she might not be a Roma, after alI. What does she mean they recognise her as a gypsy because she speaks Hungarian? 1 of ten get the feeling that 1 could set the hearing back into the right course with one single word of explanation, but the rules forbid me to speak. At last, it dawns on the interpreter and the committee: she means she could be identified as a for-eigner by the colour of her skin, but the moment she speaks Hungarian she is recognised as a Roma.
Maria makes no attempt to add anything to the hospital story that would make it more impressive. Her terse narrative reveals a sense of Iingering bitterness about the way her humanity and professional ability were put in question. 1 would Iike to encourage her to give as many details of her humiliating experiences as she can think of, knowing that the comrnittee is expecting her to do just that, and the attorney is obviously asking her a se-ries of questions with that precise aim in rnind, but Maria obstinately declines to give a vivid reporl of her ordcaI and sticks to the dry facts. Her attorney telis me later that it was unwise to do so bec au se sometimes what sounds like a hopeless case turns out to be good enough if it is appropriately 'embellished'. She recalls the case of a family who had gone to Hungary from Transylvania and later, before the IRB, complained of the Hungarians' dislike of Transylvanian refugees and their irritating habit of simply branding them as
'Romanians', which made their situation in Hungary impossible to bear. "1 can hardly re-member a more hopeless case, our chances were next to none", Lisa Winter-Card recalls.
"One of the comrnittee members finally started questioning their pretty little fair-haired
daughter, who told them, with tears in her eyes, how she was scoffed at by her school-mates, after which the hearing was soon declared elosed and the family was granted refu-gee status. By contrast, there was a family of dark-skinned Roma, whose neighbours would sct their dogs on the little gypsy boys. You could see the marks left in their legs by the missing tissue, and still they were refused." - the attorney adds, with indignation.
Canada's recognition of the gravity of grievances suffered by Hungarian citizens in their home country without effective protection from their own government is obvious ly a strain for Hungarian-Canadian relations. The presence of a great number of refugees posing a budgetary problem to Ottawa and mean ing a loss of prestige to Budapest, the question that immediately springs to mind is to what extent politics is ab le to influence decisions in refugee law. IRB was originally set up as an independent body for deci sion making on refugee applications and, in principle at least, it seems to be unaffected by influence from the powers that be. This is something about which Rosco Galati has serious doubts. He thinks that the fact that committee members are appointed for definite periods and that the extension of appointments depends upon the members' perforrnance, guarantee exactly the possibility of external influence. As rnernbers' salaries are high by Canadian standards, most of them try to swim with the current, i.e. live up to the expectations they think they are supposed to fulfil. .How else could one explain the sudden turns in decision
prefer-ences?", Galati argues. Anthony Iozzo, an ex pert at the Imrnigration Ministry thinks the
trends one can discern in decisions over time are not due to political influence. They are
rather to be put down to the fact that the members read each other's decisions, and that convincing, lucid arguments have an influence on their own decisions. Whatever
rather to be put down to the fact that the members read each other's decisions, and that convincing, lucid arguments have an influence on their own decisions. Whatever