Hunted by the Taliban, Afghans who worked with embassy sue Ottawa over immigration delays

Afghans who worked with the Canadian embassy in Kabul — and are now hiding from the Taliban — are suing the federal government, accusing Ottawa of dragging its feet on their immigration claims and demanding that it settle them without delay.

Newly unsealed court documents say 24 former employees of a law firm retained by the embassy — and one guard employed by the embassy — are living in fear because they've been given no indication from the federal government that they'll be able to move here.

"Canada is proud to be among the first countries to launch a humanitarian resettlement program for Afghan refugees," Deputy Minister of Immigration Christiane Fox told Toronto lawyers Sujit Choudhry and Maureen Silcoff in a letter dated Dec. 2, 2022.

The lawyers had written to her seeking information about their clients after launching a lawsuit in September over what they saw as unreasonable delays in processing their immigration claims.

Fox asked the lawyers to have each of the 25 plaintiffs — most of them still living in hiding in Afghanistan — sign representative forms giving their consent for the lawyers to receive updates about their cases from the government.

"The matters you have raised in your letter pertain to application processing and operations rather than matters arising in the context of the litigation," Fox wrote.

The statement of claim filed by the two lawyers — which was posted publicly in a less redacted form only this week — reveals new details about their clients.

Twenty-four of them were employees of a former Afghan law firm, Shajjan and Associates, which was retained by the Government of Canada from 2013 to 2021 to represent the embassy in legal matters in Afghanistan. Those matters included everything from traffic accidents involving diplomatic staff to real-estate transactions.

The other is a security guard who was employed by the embassy for a decade and was praised for their "tremendous" work in a letter signed by former Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan Glenn V. Davidson. The letter singled out the guard's actions in an unspecified emergency on April 15, 2012.

That's the day then-foreign affairs minister John Baird condemned a number of terror attacks on the Afghan Parliament and western embassies.

In an affidavit filed with the court, the guard, identified only as 'AA' in the document, said a manager told them on August 15, 2021 that all employees of the embassy would be brought to Canada following Kabul's fall to the Taliban and the closure of the diplomatic mission.

"I believed this to be true," AA wrote.

The guard said in the affidavit that, unable to leave Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover, they went into hiding and applied under Canada's Special Immigration Measures for employees of the Canadian government or Armed Forces, along with their loved ones.

The guard wrote they and their family members destroyed the sim cards for their mobile phones after they received a call sometime last year from someone claiming to be a member of the Taliban.