Reverend urges Canadian government to help Coptic refugees.
Immigration lawyer Chantal Desloges, left, and Rev. Majed El Shafie.
Staff photo/MIKE ADLER
He escaped a sentence of death. Now he helps others he says face death or torture.
Rev. Majed El Shafie helps rejected refugee claimants, Coptic Orthodox Christians from Egypt. He fights to convince Canadian authorities their stories are true and the danger if they are returned to Egypt is real.
"I used to be one of them. I know their pain. I know exactly what they went through," El Shafie said last week.
The Riverdale man was on a long list of Canadian Copts and Coptic churches posted on an Islamist website last month, along with illustrated instructions for making small bombs.
That threat, combined with a Dec. 31 bomb attack on Copts in Alexandria, Egypt, put many in Greater Toronto's Coptic community on edge.
El Shafie said he isn't worried about his safety. If anyone attacks him, they will do so without warning, he said. "Dogs, when they bark, they are not ready to bite yet."
Last Thursday, Christmas Eve on the Coptic calendar, he and Chantal Desloges, a Toronto immigration lawyer, were with two refugee claimants, both clients, in her Yonge Street office.
The Canadian government had ordered both men deported to Egypt.
One, in hiding and dodging a warrant for his arrest, wanted to be called Peter.
In Egypt, he said, he sold cellphone accessories, but there was a small mosque near his shop run by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Knowing he was a Christian, Peter said, the group's members asked him to join Friday prayers at the mosque. He said they sent a girl to befriend and recruit him.
After he refused their offers, he said, his store was looted and local police did nothing to help him.
A member of the Brotherhood said the next time Peter refused, "we'll kill you," he recalled, so because a cousin was getting married in Brampton, Peter flew to Canada and, more than seven years ago, applied for refugee status.
"I feel like a dead man," he said. "I ran away from Egypt. Now when I get refused (refugee status in Canada), I run away again, because I just need to stay alive."
The second man, Hany, who doesn't want his last name used, worked as a court clerk despite receiving "second-class" treatment from colleagues because he was Christian. After a member of the Brotherhood killed a police officer in 2002, Hany was entrusted with a file on the case. Members of the group approached Hany several times, asking him to destroy or hide the file.
Eventually, they started beating him, and continued even after the file was stolen from Hany's office.
Police investigated and hid Hany for a while, but he was too scared to return to work and moved to Cairo. The Brotherhood found him and started threatening him, so he fled to the U.S. and later to Canada, where he settled in Mississauga.
Both men say the Brotherhood continues to ask relatives in Egypt about them, waiting to punish them on their return. "They call my wife, they call all the time," said Hany, adding in 2010, extremists tried to kidnap both his children, a son and a daughter Hany has never seen.
His deportation is booked for Jan. 29. Desloges was seeking an injunction this week to stop it, and has filed applications to have Peter's removal to Egypt stopped on humanitarian and risk assessment grounds.
That Canada's government listens now is "our only hope," Peter said, insisting should he and Hany return to Egypt "we are not going to reach our home" before being killed by the militant Brotherhood.
Desloges, who has seven other clients facing deportation to Egypt and has represented around 65 in the past five years, said Hany and Peter could be arrested in Egypt because a claim for asylum in Canada is considered "an insult to the state."
She called on Federal Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who controls the Canada Border Services Agency, to stop all deportations of Copts until their cases are fully examined.
El Shafie said hundreds in Greater Toronto's growing Coptic community risk removal. "Save the lives of these people. Don't send them back to their deaths or their torture," he urged, adding "sadly, we must have a big disaster in Egypt" - the Alexandria bombing, which killed 23 Dec. 31 - "for the West to wake up to the persecution of the Christian minority in Egypt."
El Shafie was from a Muslim family including prominent lawyers and a judge, but said in law school he became aware the persecution of Christians in Egypt extended to Egyptian law: it is very hard to get permission to build or repair a church there.
He converted to Christianity and started a group, he said, to get Christians the same legal rights as Muslims. The Egyptian government, El Shafie has recounted, arrested and tortured him for seven days, at times unleashing attack dogs on him and burning his skin with cigarettes.
El Shafie was hospitalized to recover, but he was stripped of his citizenship, disowned by his family and sentenced to death by hanging. Under house arrest, he escaped and reached Israel on a jet ski.
In Israel, El Shafie was jailed for a year, but through help from Amnesty International and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was sent to Canada eight years ago. Five years ago, he became a citizen.
In Toronto, El Shafie started an organization, One Free World International, in 2003 to "be a voice for the voiceless," including minority Christians in countries other than Egypt, such as Iraq. He met Desloges at a Christian conference and often supports her clients's cases as an expert in the persecution of Christians.
"I was born for this work," he said last week. "We will keep helping people, no matter what."