Refugee judge nicknamed "Dr. No" for refusing over 90% of refugee claims and who called most refugees "liars" rehired in December to preside over cases

A refugee judge nicknamed “Dr. No”, for denying more than 90 per cent of claims was recently rehired by Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB).

Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk, a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada worked with the IRB between 1996 and 1998 where he made a final decision on refugee claims.

Dr. Luciuk has been a vocal critic of Canada’s refugee intake system and the IRB, claiming that he “rarely encountered a real refugee” while working there.

“Be a liar. That is the first lesson most claimants who come before the Immigration and Refugee Board learn…. Practice looking downcast. Cry. Unless you are an utter imbecile you stand an excellent chance of getting Convention refugee status in Canada,” said Luciuk in a 2001 article titled “How “Refugees” and Terrorists Get Into Canada”.

Despite the abrasiveness of Luciuk’s comments, there are several cases where criminals and terrorists have been allowed into Canada by the IRB.

In one case, a known Somali Outlaws gang member was allowed to enter Canada through the United States by the IRB and given refugee status despite repeated warnings from border officials.

Abdullahi Hashi Farah was fleeing a US arrest warrant when he arrived in Canada and had convictions in four US states.

One of the judges presiding over Farah’s case, Trent Cook, allowed the man to attain refugee status, citing his “honesty” about his criminal past.

Only seven months later Farah was arrested in a Walmart parking lot in Edmonton near a parked vehicle involved in a string of armed robberies. He awaits to be deported back to Somalia since his arrest.

“At the Board there are those who don’t want Canadians to hear any of this. They enjoy their perks and wallow in self-inflated notions of their importance. They dismiss those who, like me, accepted an appointment to the IRB out of a desire to help refugees but ended up utterly disillusioned by the determination process,” said the former immigration judge. “To silence critics they defame us. We’re anti-refugee, anti-immigrant, xenophobic. Rubbish.”

Luciuk was back at the IRB for two weeks in December 2018 presiding over refugee claims and claimed that his 2001 article described “flaws in the system as they existed then”.

Luciuk maintains that the IRC is “not the same board I experienced two decades ago.”

The refugee judge’s own parents had fled Nazi and communist tyranny and he hopes that Canada might go back to a 1940’s style system where refugees are carefully selected and then proceed to work to pay back the cost of their arrival.