Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRBC) has taken away permanent residence status from an Afghan-origin woman found guilty of murdering her three daughters and the first wife of her husband, with the help of her husband and elder son in an honor-based crime in 2009.
The convict, Tooba Yahya; her husband Muhammad Shafia; their son Hamed; the first wife of her husband Rona Amir Muhammad; and the three daughters Zainab (17), Sehar (15), and Geetin (11) had arrived Canada in 2007 from Afghanistan.
Yahya, her husband Shafia and their son Hamed were found guilty in 2012 on four counts of first-degree murder and were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Since 2009, Yahya, her husband and their son remain incarcerated at different jails – father and son in Ontario and the woman in Montreal.
Last week, the IRBC ordered that Yahya should be deported from Canada after completing her jail term.
The bodies of the deceased had been found in June 2009 in a car submerged in a canal in Kingston, Ontario. According to the prosecution, the girls were murdered because they refused to abide by the family’s rules. It argued during the trial that element of honour, directly tied to women’s sexuality and general control over their behaviour, led the troika to kill the four women ‘in an effort to cleanse them of the shame they perceived their daughters to have brought upon them’. The prosecution maintained that the deceased were drowned to the point of death or unconsciousness, and afterwards, their bodies were placed in the car that was pushed it into the canal, using the family’s other vehicle.
Meanwhile, talking to the media, Stephane Handfield, Yahya’s counsel, said her client’s life would be in danger if she was forced to return to Afghanistan. He said since Yahya was not a Canadian citizen anymore and she faced first-degree murder conviction, she had lost her right under Canadian immigration law to appeal her deportation order. However, he hoped that the country’s immigration laws could change between now and when she got out of prison.
Handfield said it was not yet clear whether similar immigration proceedings would be launched in Shafia and Hamed’s cases.
The three members of the Shafia family had appealed their verdict in 2015, arguing that expert testimony on the practice of so-called honour killing presented by the prosecution at their trial prejudiced the jury and that Hamed was actually a minor at the time the crime took place.
Though, the family’s immigration documents from 2007 contradicted these claims.
Therefore, the age argument was rejected by the Ontario Court of Appeal. Hamed then asked the Supreme Court of Canada for leave to appeal, arguing new evidence showing he was a juvenile at the time of the deaths should not have been dismissed. The top court also dismissed his appeal.
Published in Daily Times, March 23rd 2018.