HUMANITARIAN & COMPASSIONATE APPLICATIONS

Humanitarian and Compassionate application is for persons who are applying for permanent resident status from inside Canada based on unusual and undeserved or disproportionate hardship that they would be experiencing if their Humanitarian & Compassionate application is not granted and they are removed from Canada.  In essence, the Canadian immigration laws require all applications for permanent residency to be submitted from outside Canada. However, the law also recognizes the fact that in certain circumstances, the removal of some people may cause such harm and inconvenience that the person’s removal will be unfair. In such circumstances, the law allows the person to ask for exemption from the normal requirement of applying from outside Canada, based on humanitarian and compassionate factors.

In order to qualify for such an exemption, you would have to show that your removal from Canada will cause you (1) unusual and undeserved or (2) disproportionate hardship. To this end, you would have to submit a formal H & C application package and support the H&C application with compelling evidence of the hardship that you claim you will be suffering upon removal.

As you can imagine, the evidence may take various forms and quite often overlap with one another. In general, there are no formal/legal limitations on the type of evidence that you may wish to have considered in your H&C application; so long as the evidence can show the hardship that you would experience upon removal.

A Suitable Candidate? 

A suitable candidate for an H&C application would be one who is, both economically and socially speaking, well established in Canada by reason of prolonged presence. Prolonged presence normally means living in Canada for at least a few years during which the person has developed extensive roots and connections such that severing those roots will amount to unusual and undeserved suffering.

The foregoing does not, however, mean that a newcomer to Canada would not be able to successfully apply for humanitarian and compassionate consideration since there may be circumstances under which a person may face such unusual and undeserved hardship in her/his home country of such compelling nature so that it would overcome and outweigh the short period of residence in Canada. 

Be that as it may, it is imperative that the humanitarian application package be accompanied by a strong written submissions addressing not only the legal factors but also the factual circumstances by way of applying the law to the facts in presenting a well-rounded application highlighting important humanitarian and compassionate aspects so as to convince the reviewing officer of the compelling nature of the case. This is because H&C applications are discretionary decisions and it is up to the officer to decide whether s/he wants to exercise his/her discretion positively or negatively.

Should the H & C application be refused, you may appeal the H&C rejection to the Federal Court. 

Thus, negative H&C decisions are subject to appeal. The appeal from the refusal of an H&C application goes directly to the Federal Court and must be initiated within 15 days of receiving  the negative decision. For further information in this regard, please visit the Appeals to the Federal Court section of our site.

Otherwise, if you wish to obtain case-specific information or to take advantage of our free half hour initial consultation, please contact our office at (416) 365-9473 or (416) 454-0068.