[LINK] "Devaluing the Canadian Passport"

[rfmcdonald]

James Bow's post on how the passports of some Canadians have been stripped of their value makes valuable, if disturbing, reading.

[T]here has been the case of Suaad Hagi Mohamud, a Somali-born Canadian citizen visiting Kenya.

Ms. Mohamud was about to return to Toronto when a Kenyan official at Nairobi’s Airport looked at her passport and decided that the woman in front of him looked nothing like the woman in the picture. He accused her of being an impostor, confiscated her passport and refused her entry onto the plane. The passport was sent to Canadian consular officials, who backed up Kenyan accusations that the woman was an impostor, and sent the passport back to Kenyan officials who then proceeded with criminal proceedings. If found guilty by a Kenyan court, Ms. Mohamud faces deportation to the country of her birth, Somalia.

Several things about this case do not make sense. Ms. Mohamud’s twelve-year-old son remains in Canada and, while Ms. Mohamud awaits her fate in a Nairobi hotel, she has remained in phone contact with him. Her son vouches for his mother’s identity, as do her neighbours and her MP, Joe Volpe. What is more disturbing is, again, how the Ministry of Foreign Affairs dragged its feet, and risked having Ms. Mohamud deported to Somalia before the matter of her identity could be proven one way or the other.

Initially, Ms. Mohamud offered her fingerprints to prove that she was who she said she was. She was fingerprinted, after all, when she went through the process of becoming a landed immigrant and then a citizen of Canada. After some hemming and hawing, Canadian officials accepted her fingerprints, and then, after saying nothing for days while her Kenyan court date approached, informed her that the original fingerprints had been destroyed, meaning no comparison was possible. So, why lead her on? They then hemmed and hawed over her offer to do a DNA test, to prove that she is the mother of her twelve-year-old son in Canada. That’s finally in process, and fortunately her deportation hearing in Kenya, which was to be held this past Friday, was delayed until October 16 to allow the results to be placed in evidence.

It doesn’t help that the basis of the accusation that Ms. Mohamud is an impostor is disturbingly vague. Her lips, apparently, did not pass muster, and there were concerns that her glasses were different. How much do we look like our passport photos? Is this the sort of treatment we can expect if we run into problems abroad?