Once an outspoken critic of Canada's refugee-determination system, Mohamed Cherfi now sits in silence in a jail cell in New York state, afraid of antagonizing the Canadian and U.S. governments that hold his fate in their hands - afraid of being deported back to Algeria.

Dragged out of a church in Quebec City in March, Cherfi has spent the past seven months behind bars in Batavia, N.Y., awaiting the U.S. judge's decision that will come today on whether to grant him asylum.

Canada had already rejected his asylum request, and returned him to the U.S. - whence he had first entered Canada.

But while Cherfi has stopped speaking out, others who have been through Canada's revolving refugee door - some already deported, some awaiting deportation - are vocal, and their words are being echoed by a growing chorus of priests, ministers and refugee advocates.

They say Canada is increasingly repressive toward refugees and charge that no room is left to correct mistakes that may have life-and-death consequences.

The Syed family, who came to Canada through the U.S. and were escorted by immigration agents from their Lachine home to the U.S. border last July, believe they are one such mistake.

"The Canadian government uses human rights as a slogan but doesn't care what happens to people like us," said Nahida Syed, a native of Pakistan who now lives in Virginia with her husband and three children.

"The extent we have suffered is terrible. We wait, and while we wait we cannot work or have access to medical care."

- - -

Citizenship and Immigration Canada spokesperson Richard St. Louis said the Canadian government's mandate for dealing with refugees ends at the border. CIC doesn't follow up except in very rare cases when "the whole planet is talking about a case," he said.

One such case was that of Haroun M'Barek. Despite fears he would be tortured because of his political activism as a student in Tunisia, M'Barek was deported there in 2001, two weeks shy of finishing a master's degree in law at Universite Laval.

When he was indeed arrested, tried and tortured, Ottawa scrambled to bring him back, issuing him a rare ministerial permit to return as a refugee.

- - -

Critics worry that M'Barek's ordeal was not an isolated example. Stewart Istvanffy, a Montreal immigration lawyer whose clients include the Syeds and M'Barek, cites other cases of deportation into detention.

"You can see the system for evaluating danger doesn't work," Istvanffy said, referring to the Pre-removal Risk Assessment, whereby immigration officials examine the risk, if a person is deported, of persecution, torture, death or cruel and unusual treatment. The officials refuse 98.4 per cent of those requests for stays of deportation.

- - -

Richard Goldman, a refugee protection co-ordinator for a coalition of refugee advocacy groups in Montreal, says that what is needed is an appeal process for refugee claimants whose cases have been rejected.

An appeal process was written into a 2002 reform of the Canadian Immigration Act to compensate for the reduction in the number of federal Immigration and Refugee Board judges who hear each case from two to one.

But Denis Coderre, who was then the immigration minister, said the appeals process could not be implemented because there was a huge backlog in the refugee-claim system.

Goldman said that excuse is no longer valid. The number of new claims has dropped off since then, from about 45,000 in 2001-02 to about 29,000 in 2003-04, he said.

IRB spokesperson Dominique Forget said the board is processing almost twice as many old claims as it is receiving new ones.

Immigration Minister Judy Sgro declined an interview with The Gazette, but in July said there were too many delays holding up the process already.

Sgro was referring to options already available to unsuccessful refugee claimants, who can apply for leave to have the IRB decision reviewed for errors of law by the Federal Court. Appeals are granted in about 15 per cent of cases. Rejected refugee claimants can also apply to CIC to remain in Canada on humanitarian grounds, or through CIC's Pre-removal Risk Assessment.

But there is still no avenue for appeal on the merits of the case, which are now decided by one IRB commissioner.

Sgro said she will be holding consultations in the next few weeks on how to reform the refugee determination process.

- - -

In the absence of an appeal mechanism, some rejected refugee claimants have sought sanctuary in churches. Many remain confined to church basements across Canada. There are three families in Montreal alone.

Still others, like Cherfi and Syed, are appealing Canadian decisions on their claims in the U.S.

Syed said that in her case, the IRB commissioner ignored evidence that she was a member of the Kashmir independence party and would be persecuted if sent back to Pakistan.

The commissioner concentrated rather on the fact that the Syeds lied in their refugee application: they had been in the U.S. for three months before arriving at the Lacolle border, but told immigration officials that they had been in the U.S. only a few days.

"The immigration people should investigate the facts - not the race, colour, travel route, but the cause. They should not play with people's lives."

Canada, U.S. hatch new refugee plan

The Safe Third Country Agreement was signed by the United States and Canada in December 2002, as part of the "Smart Border" package of reforms to enhance border security and improve the refugee-claims process on both sides.

The agreement will not come into force until both countries have approved regulations on how to implement it.

It states that a person who wishes to file for asylum must do so in the country where he or she lands from overseas - and only in that country.

Claimants travelling through the U.S. to get to the border will no longer be able to file for asylum in Canada, and will be sent back to file in the U.S.

When the agreement was signed, then-federal immigration minister Denis Coderre said it would address "a fundamental concern about asylum-shopping for economic advantage interfering with legitimate claims for refugee protection from those in genuine need."