OTTAWA – A Russian woman who feared being deported to face a conviction for opposing Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine has been granted Canadian citizenship, months after officials blocked her...
She was convicted, in absentia, of a crime in Russia. The crime related to the war special military operation in Ukraine. The law made it stops “public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”
Canada, quite reasonably, has rules that you don’t automatically / easily get citizenship if you have a criminal record in another country. But, it’s based on whether the thing you did would be a crime in Canada. So, if an immigrant from Sri Lanka has a conviction for taking a selfie with the Buddha, it doesn’t count because that law doesn’t exist in Canada.
What gets tricky is that Canada does have a law that prevents “wilfully [publishing] a statement, tale or news that [the person] knows is false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief”. So, if you pretend that the legal system in Russia is fair, then what she did would be a crime in Canada.
I don’t know how they can reasonably handle this except on a case-by-case basis. Of course someone publishing an anti-war blog entry and getting convicted for it should not have that count against them when trying to get Canadian citizenship. But, a conviction for assault should be a blocker. OTOH, what if the “assault” is a trumped-up charge that the police used when arresting anti-war protesters?
For people who aren’t reading the article:
She was convicted, in absentia, of a crime in Russia. The crime related to the
warspecial military operation in Ukraine. The law made it stops “public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”Canada, quite reasonably, has rules that you don’t automatically / easily get citizenship if you have a criminal record in another country. But, it’s based on whether the thing you did would be a crime in Canada. So, if an immigrant from Sri Lanka has a conviction for taking a selfie with the Buddha, it doesn’t count because that law doesn’t exist in Canada.
What gets tricky is that Canada does have a law that prevents “wilfully [publishing] a statement, tale or news that [the person] knows is false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief”. So, if you pretend that the legal system in Russia is fair, then what she did would be a crime in Canada.
I don’t know how they can reasonably handle this except on a case-by-case basis. Of course someone publishing an anti-war blog entry and getting convicted for it should not have that count against them when trying to get Canadian citizenship. But, a conviction for assault should be a blocker. OTOH, what if the “assault” is a trumped-up charge that the police used when arresting anti-war protesters?