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Migration Jurisprudence from the South › Canada

Canadian Council for Refugees v. Canada (Safe Third Country Agreement)

Supreme Court of Canada · Canada · 2023-06-16 · National court

Citation: 2023 SCC 17
Type of case: Constitutional and human rights
Outcome: Decided against the migrant side

Question

Does returning asylum seekers to the United States under the Safe Third Country Agreement breach the Charter?

What the court decided

No breach of section 7, because the scheme has safety valves; the equality claim was sent back to the Federal Court.

In plain language

People turned back at the US border argued they faced detention and refoulement in the US. The Supreme Court upheld the scheme for now but sent the gender-discrimination argument back.

Dalam bahasa sederhana

Orang yang ditolak di perbatasan AS berpendapat mereka akan ditahan dan dipulangkan di AS. MA mempertahankan skema itu untuk sementara tetapi mengembalikan argumen diskriminasi gender.

Pertanyaan: Apakah memulangkan pencari suaka ke Amerika Serikat berdasarkan Perjanjian Negara Ketiga Aman melanggar Piagam?

What happened afterwards

  • 2023-06-16: Judgment.

Sources

Open this decision in the interactive collection (compare, filter, Indonesian view, downloads).

Cite as: Institute for Migrant Rights (2026), Migration Jurisprudence from the South, version 0.1, https://theimr.org/court-decisions/d/ca-ccr-2023/. This page summarizes a court decision for research and advocacy; it is not legal advice.

For researchers

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The coded variables support statistical analysis in law: cross-national comparison, regression and event-history designs, and law and economics questions such as how recruitment fees, wage protection and limits on changing employer affect migrant workers. The data can be downloaded for replication.

Keywords: case law; jurisprudence; judicial decisions; comparative constitutional law; courts and migration; judicial behavior; litigation outcomes; refugee law; non-refoulement; citizenship and nationality; empirical legal studies; empirical legal scholarship; quantitative legal research; statistical analysis in law; law and economics; law and economics of migration; comparative law; socio-legal studies; legal pluralism; migration law; labor migration; migrant workers’ rights; human rights law; access to justice; Global South; Asia; Africa; Middle East; Latin America; Indonesia; open data; replication data.