Canada has become a safe haven for officials from Iran’s monstrous regime

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Samira Mohyeddin is a journalist, a scholar of genocide, and the host and producer of the podcast Gay Girl Gone.

We only heard the man with blood on his hands speak twice: once, to correct his Persian translator, and later, to confirm that he understood the reasons for his deportation order.

This was Seyed Salman Samani’s third and final hearing at Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB). His lawyer had requested that it be closed, but the IRB declined, and so I was among the three journalists who attended the virtual hearing last month. And in the end, IRB adjudicator Kirk Dickenson ordered Mr. Samani – Iran’s former deputy interior minister – to be deported from Canada.

The IRB found Mr. Samani “inadmissible to Canada” under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act’s Section 35 (1), which stipulates that “a permanent resident or a foreign national is inadmissible on grounds of violating human or international rights.” Mr. Samani’s senior position in the government also meant he was inadmissible because he was “in the service of a government that, in the opinion of the Minister, engages or has engaged in terrorism, systematic or gross human rights violations, or genocide, a war crime or a crime against humanity.”

Halfway through the hearing, as Mr. Dickenson was summarizing the evidence against Mr. Samani, he mentioned a key date: Nov. 15, 2019. He did not go into the details of why that day was significant for Mr. Samani’s case. So allow me: That was when protests erupted across Iran and quickly spread to more than 100 cities, prompting Tehran to turn off the internet for seven days, in what the internet-tracking company NetBlocks called “the most severe disconnection in any country in terms of its technical complexity and breadth.” During that weeklong shutdown, Reuters reported the killing of more than 1,500 protesters by Iran’s security forces. Iran’s deputy interior minister at the time was tasked with denying the deadly crackdown during what is now known as Bloody November. Seyed Salman Samani was that minister.

Canada had issued Mr. Samani a multiple re-entry visa on Nov. 25, 2017, in Ankara, Turkey; the visa was valid until Oct. 17, 2021. He arrived in Canada on Oct. 7, 2021 – about a year before Mahsa Amini was killed at the hands of Iran’s so-called morality police in September, 2022, which sparked massive protests again. After Tehran cracked down on those protesters, reportedly killing more than 500 Iranians, Canada designated the Islamic Republic regime as a government that has engaged in terrorism and systematic and gross human-rights violations; as a result, all senior officials in the service of the Iranian regime from Nov. 15, 2019, onward were to be inadmissible for entry into Canada. But because of when he arrived here, Mr. Samani was granted visitor status for six months.

He’s not alone. Canada Border Services Agency is now investigating dozens of cases involving senior members of the Iranian regime now living in Canada. One of the first deportation orders the IRB issued this year was for Majid Iranmanesh, the former director-general of Iran’s Vice-Presidency for Science and Technology, who had also entered Canada with a visa issued in Turkey. During his deportation hearing, he angrily said: “I was transparent with regards to my jobs and job titles, so why did you give me a visa?”

This is also the question that perplexes most Iranian Canadians. Why is Canada handing out visas to Iranian regime officials in the first place? Does Canada’s embassy in Ankara not have the ability to do a simple Google search?

And why did it take until the death of Ms. Amini, a 22-year-old non-Canadian living 9,000 kilometres away, for Ottawa to decide that Iranian regime officials are not welcome in this country? Why weren’t the 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents killed on Flight PS752 enough for Canada to act? What about the hostage-taking of Saeed Malekpour, Ramin Jahanbegloo, Mostafa Azizi, Hadi Ghassemi-Shall, Homa Hoodfar, Hossein Derakhshan, Maryam Mombeini and Maziar Bahari, or the suspicious death of Canadian academic Kavous Seyed Emami – why weren’t their plights enough to spur the government to give Tehran that designation?

In 2014, I attended another virtual hearing involving the Iranian government in Canada. Our Supreme Court was hearing the case of Zahra Kazemi, the Canadian photojournalist who was brutally tortured, raped and murdered by Iranian authorities in 2003. For more than a decade, her son, Stephan Hachemi, had been trying to get justice for his mom, taking her case to Canada’s highest court so justices could decide whether the State Immunity Act permits victims of torture and their families to sue perpetrating states and non-Canadian government officials. Disappointingly, the court ruled 6-1 against her son’s ability to sue the Iranian state for what they did to his mother.

Ten years later, Canada would amend the act such that a foreign state that supports or has supported torture or extrajudicial killing is not immune from the jurisdiction of any court in Canada. But that was too little, too late for Ms. Kazemi.

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Then, in a horrible twist of irony, Morteza Talaei – a former general with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who led Tehran’s police force during Ms. Kazemi’s detainment and killing – was filmed working out in Richmond Hill, Ont., the heart of the Iranian-Canadian community, while visiting his daughter and grandchildren on vacation in 2021. Canada sanctioned Mr. Talaei months after he returned to Iran. But the sighting of him and other Iranian regime officials here in Canada reminds me of Hannah Arendt’s quote about Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem: “It is one thing to ferret out mass murderers and other criminals from their hiding places, and it is another thing to find them prominent and flourishing in the public realm.”

Iranians who have chosen Canada as a sanctuary – as the place where they can restart their lives in peace – should not have to contend with the possibility that the very people they’re fleeing could join them here. In fact, it is the Iranian community in Canada that has been forced to do the difficult work of spotting these former officials and notifying Canadian authorities. Just last week, a senior anchor for Seda va Sima, Iran’s state broadcaster, was filmed in the Vancouver airport with his wife and daughter. The broadcaster’s so-called journalists often double as interrogators of political prisoners and broadcast their forced confessions, and some of them are sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury.

Last week, as part of Canada’s foreign-interference commission, Hamed Esmaeilion – whose wife and daughter were both killed on Flight PS752 – testified about the threats and intimidation he faces on a daily basis in his pursuit of justice. He brought up Seyed Salman Samani’s case as an example of why he doesn’t feel safe in this country. Why, he asked, was Canada deporting him, “instead of putting him on trial for crimes against humanity?”

It has become a running joke among Iranians that when the Islamic Republic government falls, half the officials will just make their way to Canada, because they already have a Canadian passport. But our immigration system shouldn’t be fodder for comedians in Iran. When then-public safety minister Marco Mendicino designated Iran as a state that engages in systemic human-rights violations and declared senior officials of the Iranian government officially banned from Canada on Nov. 13, 2022, he stressed that this country would not be a safe haven for Iranian officials.

I hate to break it to the government, but it already is.