By agency report
A Canadian court has declared that Nigeria’s two major political parties, the All Progressives Congress, APC, and the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, are terrorist organisations.
The court made the decision, while denying asylum to a Nigerian, Douglas Egharevba, over his decade-long affiliation with both parties.
Justice Phuong Ngo of the appellate court, while delivering judgement, dismissed Egharevba’s application for judicial review after the Immigration Appeal Division, IAD, had earlier found him inadmissible under Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, IRPA.
Local media reports say that the Canadian Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness had submitted that the APC and PDP were terrorist organizations on account of their having been implicated in political violence, subversion of democracy and electoral bloodshed in Nigeria.
Egharevba, according to the minister, as well as court records, was a PDP member from 1999 to 2007 before joining the APC, where he remained until 2017.
He moved to Canada in Sept. 2017 and disclosed his political history.
Canadian immigration authorities flagged his affiliations, citing intelligence reports linking both parties to electoral violence and politically motivated killings.
The IAD based its decision largely on the PDP’s conduct during the 2003 state elections and 2004 local government polls, when the party allegedly engaged in ballot stuffing, voter intimidation and killing of opposition supporters.
The tribunal found that the party leadership benefited from the violence and took no action to stop it, meeting Canada’s legal definition of subversion under paragraph 34(1)(b.1) of the IRPA.
The judge, therefore, affirmed that mere membership in an organisation linked to terrorism or democratic subversion was enough to trigger inadmissibility under paragraph 34(1)(f) of the IRPA, even without proof of personal involvement.
The court also dismissed Egharevba’s claim that political violence was widespread across all Nigerian parties without exception.
According to the court, even flawed Nigerian elections constitute a democratic process under Canadian law and that undermining them qualifies as subversion.
Egharevba was therefore denied his application for asylum in Canada, and would soon be deported from the country basically for having been a member of Nigeria’s two leading political parties in the past.
