Docket: IMM-15414-23
Citation: 2025 FC 553
Toronto, Ontario, March 25, 2025
PRESENT: The Honourable Mr. Justice A. Grant
BETWEEN: |
MAGDALENA NASTITI SURYANDARI
HENDRA AUGUST WARANKIRAN
|
Applicants |
and |
THE MINISTER OF CITIZENSHIP AND IMMIGRATION |
Respondent |
JUDGMENT AND REASONS
I. OVERVIEW
[1] The Applicants seek judicial review of a decision by the Refugee Appeal Division [RAD]. In that decision, the RAD confirmed a determination that the Applicants are not in need of refugee protection in Canada because they have a safe and viable internal flight alternative [IFA] within Indonesia, their country of origin.
[2] For the reasons that follow, I will dismiss this application for judicial review.
II. BACKGROUND
A. Facts
[3] Magdalena Nastiti Suryandari [the Principal Applicant] and her husband, Hendra August Warankiran, [the Associate Applicant] are Christians, and citizens of Indonesia. They fear members of an Islamic fundamentalist group – known as the Front Pembela Islam [FPI] – who threatened them after they had asked a local mosque to lower the volume of their loudspeaker during daily morning prayers.
[4] The Refugee Protection Division [RPD] of the Immigration and Refugee Board found the Applicants to be credible, but ultimately rejected their claim because it concluded that they have a safe and reasonable IFA in various other locations in Indonesia: Makassar, Denpasar, and Yogyakarta.
[5] On appeal, the RAD performed its own assessment of the evidence and came to the same conclusion as the RPD, namely that the Applicants were credible but had failed to establish that the FPI have the motivation to find them in the proposed internal flight locations. The RAD also confirmed the RPD’s brief reasons on the reasonableness of these IFA locations, as the Applicants had not established that relocating to them would be unduly harsh or in any other way unreasonable.
III. ISSUES
[6] The only issue raised in this matter is whether the RAD reasonably confirmed the RPD’s determination that the Applicants have a viable IFA.
[7] More specifically, the Applicants frame this issue as follows: “Did the RAD err in assessing whether there is a reasonable chance that the Applicants will be located in the IFAs?”
IV. STANDARD OF REVIEW
[8] The parties do not dispute that the standard of review is reasonableness: Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65 [Vavilov]. A reasonable decision contains no fatal flaws in its overarching logic. In conducting a reasonableness review, a court “must consider the outcome of the administrative decision in light of its underlying rationale in order to ensure that the decision as a whole is transparent, intelligible and justified”
(Vavilov at para 15).
[9] It is the role of administrative decision-making bodies to assess and evaluate the evidence before it. Absent “exceptional circumstances,”
a reviewing court should not interfere with a tribunal’s factual findings. The reviewing court must refrain from reweighing the evidence considered by the decision maker: Vavilov at para 125.
V. ANALYSIS
[10] The Applicants make essentially two arguments on judicial review.
[11] First, the Applicants argue that the RAD erred in concluding that, because they and their family members have not been contacted by the FPI since the Spring of 2022, they will not face more than a reasonable chance of persecution in the IFAs.
[12] Second, the Applicants argue that the RAD erred by relying on the fact that they were not located while in hiding prior to leaving Indonesia, as support for the finding that they would not be found if they returned to the IFA locations. This finding, they argue, is essentially predicated on an assumption that the Applicants could avoid a forward-looking risk of persecution by remaining in hiding in Indonesia, which is contrary to well-established principles of refugee law. I will consider these arguments in turn.
A. Efforts to find Applicants through family members
[13] The RAD’s finding that there was insufficient evidence to show an ongoing FPI interest in finding the Applicants was based, in part, on the fact that the organization had not contacted their family members to try and find them. In support of this finding, the RAD relied on two decisions of this Court, Leon v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2020 FC 428 [Leon] and Chavez Perez v Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2021 FC 1021 [Chavez Perez].
[14] The Applicants argue that the facts in both Leon and Chavez Perez are distinguishable from the facts in this case, and that those distinctions suggest the RAD erred in relying on the lack of contact with family members to support its finding that the FPI was not motivated to find them. For the reasons that follow, and taking into consideration the deference owed administrative decision-makers on factual findings, I disagree.
[15] The Applicants assert that Leon and Chavez Perez are distinguishable because, in both cases, the agents of harm had already located family members, and therefore, the lack of any contact with them was reasonably indicative of a lack of motivation on the part of the agents of harm. Moreover, in Chavez Perez the agents of harm were municipal police officers, so it stood to reason that, had they wanted to contact family members in the area, they could have done so.
[16] I agree with the Applicants that decision-makers should not reflexively assume that agents of harm will try to locate their victims by approaching or targeting family members. However, this is a pure finding of fact that will vary in every case and will warrant deference from this Court.
[17] In this case, the Applicant’s own evidence was that the agents of harm were ubiquitous in Indonesia and were extremely powerful, with contacts in the government, police, the courts, and schools, and with access to reporting information from neighbourhood associations. This being the case, I have no basis upon which to conclude that it was unreasonable for the RAD to find it relevant that the FPI had apparently taken no steps over the previous year and a half to find either the Applicants, or their family members.
[18] For largely the same reason, I do not believe that the RAD erred in relying on Leon and Chavez Perez. While there was evidence in those cases that the agents of harm previously knew of the whereabouts of family members, I am not convinced that much turns on this distinction. This is once again because of the Applicant’s testimony about the ability of the FPI to track individuals throughout Indonesia.
[19] The same logic applies to the fact that the agents of harm in Chavez Perez were municipal police officers. In this case, the Applicant’s description of the FPI suggested that it had arguably a greater ability than a local police force to access the levers of government to track down those they target.
[20] Fundamentally, the problem with the Applicants’ argument is this: they assert on the one hand that the FPI is a powerful organization that could find them anywhere in Indonesia through their infiltration of many levels of government. Yet, on the other hand, they argue that it was unreasonable for the RAD, based on this same assertion, to find that such an organization could likely find the Applicants through their family members. The Applicants may disagree with the RAD’s factual findings, but I cannot find that they were the product of an irrational chain of analysis.
B. Did the RAD find that the Applicants could only avoid persecution by hiding?
[21] Prior to departing Indonesia, the Applicants left their home and hid at the home of Ms. Suryandari’s brother. They argue that it was an error for the RAD to find that their ability to avoid the FPI during this time was indicative of a lack of motivation on the part of the FPI. They also argue that, if required to return to one of the IFA locations, they would not live in hiding (or should not be forced to), and as such, they would be found by the agents of harm.
[22] Once again, I disagree with the Applicants. First, as the RAD noted, the fact that the Applicants hid at their brother’s home does not, on its own, suggest that the FPI was searching for them. To this extent, it was again relevant that there was (and is) no indication that the FPI have taken any measures to locate the Applicants, either directly or through their family, since the triggering incidents took place in the Spring of 2022.
[23] It is also important to consider the RAD’s reasons in context, and in their entirety. For example, elsewhere in the RAD’s decision, it observed that the Applicants’ situation was “localized to their neighbourhood”
and did not escalate into a widespread riot, as had happened in other instances. The RAD also noted that there was no evidence that the Applicants’ targeting had been extended beyond the four individuals involved in the originating incidents, for example to the larger FPI group or other Islamic groups in the area. These findings were reasonably open to the RAD.
[24] To this end, it was also reasonable for the RAD to point out that the FPI was banned in Indonesia in 2020, and its leader and many other members were arrested. While the RAD acknowledged the evidence that the group has since re-formed, it was reasonable for the RAD to consider this factor in assessing the ongoing motivation of the newly formed group to target the Applicants in one of the IFA locations.
VI. CONCLUSION
[25] For the above reasons, this application for judicial review is dismissed. The parties did not propose a question for certification, and I agree that none arises.
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