Canadian authorities have denied the asylum request of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) bigwig, Mosunmola Awonuga, and her three children after detecting spelling errors in the way the name of the major opposition party was written on her supporting documents.
The PDP stalwart was represented by Jacqueline Ozor of Law Ville Professional Corporation in Toronto, Ontario. The attorney general of Canada stood in for the minister of citizenship and immigration who was listed as the respondent.
Awonuga based her asylum application on her alleged persecution by the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) for being an active member of the PDP and also that her female children would encounter the painful procedure of female genital mutilation.
The Canadian immigration authorities however deemed the claims “clearly fraudulent” owing to the spelling discrepancies in PDP-issued documents, including a membership card, stamp and a letter tendered to support her plea.
Awonuga applied for a judicial review of the denial but was dismissed.
The Canadian government could not understand why PDP was written as “Peoples Democratic Party” on her membership card issued in 2012. But the stamp on the card read “People Democratic Party” without the alphabet letter ‘s’, which according to them was inconsistent and unreasonable for a big political party in Nigeria, where fake documents were also common.
To worsen the error, the Refugee Protection Division (RPD), a division that grants or denies asylum requests in Canada “also noted the party name was spelt ‘Peoples’ Democratic Party’ (with an apostrophe) in both the Letter of Support’s header and contents,” Madam Justice Go of a federal court in Toronto said, while giving reasons for the asylum denial on January 8.
When asked to explain the discrepancy, Awonuga responded that she was not aware of the mistake “but she was seeing it now” did not allay the fears of the Canadian court that the documents were not genuine.
The explanation that “maybe it was the way they (PDP) made the stamp” was adjudged too weak and untenable for the error.
Awonuga’s counsel argued that Canadian standards should not be applied to non-Canadian documents and that Nigeria, as “a third world country,” was prone to having “printing errors in their documents,” and it was not reasonable not to anticipate such mistakes and bear it out on citizens that are innocent.
Meanwhile, the RPD said “it would be reasonable to expect that a major political party be able to spell its own name correctly and consistently in their own documents.”
Ms Go, the justice over the matter, stated that parties and decision-makers of other countries should also exercise caution and avoid making mistakes that would “suggest that their peoples and institutions somehow lack the competence to produce documents in a professional manner.”
Go reiterated the judgments of identical cases decided in the past that misspellings in government stamps or letterheads were not the same as spelling errors in the body of a document.
She made it known that the RPD was reasonable in its decision to find the documents “fraudulent.”
While justifying Awonuga’s asylum denial by the RPD, Go said it was strange that the applicant’s police report was issued in Lagos when she was supposedly living in “Akure,” which “negatively impacts their overall credibility.”
Also, Go wondered why there were many verbatim repetitions between the police report and Awonuga’s statement in her Basis of Claim (BOC).
The justice cited a sentence in which Awonuga said she “heard (the agent of persecution) was planning to use diabolical powers (voodoo powers) to hypnotize them and take the children for circumcision” as appearing in the same sequence in the police report allegedly filed in 2017 and her BOC drafted in 2020.
She said Awonuga’s explanation that she was already in Canada when the police report was issued was not sufficient to account for the precision and verbatim similarity of words in her BOC.
Furthermore, the ages of her children in the supposed 2017 police report did not change in the BOC, which according to her was drafted in 2020.
According to Go, Ms Awonuga could not give a reasonable explanation for the “overwhelming number of striking similarities and near word-for-word copies” between both documents.
