Background
Ezzat Fahs, an 81-year-old Lebanese national with dementia, was granted refugee protection in Canada approximately 14 years ago based on threats from terrorist organizations in Lebanon. After obtaining permanent resident status in 2017, he returned to Lebanon five times — primarily to visit gravely ill siblings and attend their funerals. The Minister of Immigration and Citizenship applied to cease his Convention Refugee status under section 108(1)(a) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), alleging he had voluntarily reavailed himself of Lebanon’s protection by travelling there on a Lebanese passport.
Because of his dementia, Mr. Fahs did not testify at the cessation hearing held in January 2023; his son acted as his designated representative and testified on his behalf. Mr. Fahs acknowledged returning to Lebanon but maintained he took security precautions throughout — including travelling directly from the airport to his family home by car, covering his face with a scarf, and limiting hospital visits to brief, quiet hours in a small village hospital. The Refugee Protection Division (RPD) allowed the Minister’s application in a decision dated February 22, 2023, finding the three elements of reavailment were met: voluntariness, intent to reavail, and actual obtainment of protection. The RPD concluded his safety measures were minimal and did not amount to “living in hiding.”
Mr. Fahs sought judicial review before the Federal Court, challenging the substance of the RPD’s decision. Because his challenge went to the merits rather than procedure, Justice Sadrehashemi reviewed the decision on a reasonableness standard, as established in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65.
The Court’s Holding
Justice Sadrehashemi allowed the judicial review and set aside the RPD’s decision. The determinative error was the RPD’s framing of the safety-precautions inquiry: rather than considering the totality of precautionary measures taken and their impact on the reavailment analysis, the RPD reduced the question to a binary one — whether Mr. Fahs had been “in hiding.” That standard is not supported by the governing framework. The Federal Court of Appeal in Canada (Citizenship and Immigration) v Galindo Camayo, 2022 FCA 50, identifies safety precautions as one of several factors in a highly contextual, individualized assessment of whether a refugee intended to waive the protection of the country of asylum; it does not require proof of living in hiding.
The Court noted that two prior Federal Court decisions had identified the same error in analogous circumstances: Gorgis v Canada (Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness), 2025 FC 117, and Cao v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2025 FC 2018. Justice Sadrehashemi found no basis to distinguish those cases and expressly adopted their reasoning. The RPD’s binary framing prevented it from properly weighing the cumulative effect of Mr. Fahs’ precautionary conduct against the nature of the risk he faced.
The Court also found the RPD failed to consider material aspects of the evidence, including that Mr. Fahs’ hospital visits were brief, during quiet hours, and at a small village facility — details relevant to assessing the seriousness of his precautions. The decision was set aside and remitted for redetermination before a different RPD member. No question of general importance was certified.
Key Takeaways
- The RPD cannot require a refugee to prove they were “in hiding” during returns to their country of nationality; the correct inquiry under Galindo Camayo is a holistic, contextual assessment of all precautionary measures taken in light of the nature of the risk.
- Cessation decisions carry severe consequences — loss of refugee status, loss of permanent residence, removal from Canada, and a one-year bar on humanitarian and compassionate applications — which heightens the RPD’s obligation to provide a thorough and reasoned explanation.
- The reavailment analysis must account for the refugee’s subjective intent; travel to a home country for compelling humanitarian reasons (visiting dying family members, attending funerals) and evidence of ongoing fear remain relevant to whether the refugee intended to waive asylum protection.
- This decision follows and reinforces a consistent line of Federal Court authority (Gorgis; Cao) rejecting the binary “in hiding” test as an impermissible distortion of the Galindo Camayo framework.
Why It Matters
This ruling is significant for immigration and refugee practitioners because it clarifies — and continues to police — the boundaries of the reavailment cessation test. The Federal Court has now repeatedly corrected RPD panels that collapse the nuanced, contextual precautions inquiry into a single blunt question of whether the claimant was hiding. The decision reinforces that cessation is not a mechanical exercise: adjudicators must weigh the full picture of a refugee’s conduct, including the specific nature of the threat, the steps actually taken to mitigate detection, and the circumstances surrounding each visit.
For practitioners, the case also illustrates the heightened scrutiny courts apply when cessation is at stake — particularly for vulnerable applicants such as elderly persons with cognitive impairments. The loss of both refugee protection and permanent residence status in a single proceeding is among the most consequential outcomes in Canadian immigration law, and decision-makers are expected to meet a correspondingly high standard of reasoning.