Afghan refugee says similarities show he didn’t get a fresh look at his application as ordered by Federal Court.

How much cutting and pasting is OK?

That’s the question before the Federal Court in a legal challenge involving an Afghan refugee in limbo in Turkey, whose resettlement application has twice been rejected by Canadian immigration officials.

Specifically, if an immigration officer copies and pastes a chunk of a colleague’s work — almost word for word — in refusing the same applicant, does that meet the bar of a fresh and independent analysis required for a case under reconsideration?

In asking the court to quash the latest refusal, lawyers for Atiqullah Lali said 70 per cent of the analysis to justify the decision consists of “copied and pasted material” from the reasons for the first refusal.

The “near verbatim reuse” of the analysis gave rise to a “reasonable apprehension of bias” that the reviewing officer was predisposed to refuse the application, Lali’s co-counsel Andrew Koltun told the court in a hearing Wednesday.

Rather than stepping back and independently reviewing the evidence, he argued that the officer simply tried to “bootstrap and improve upon the refusal reasons” in his client’s case.

How the case began

Lali, 30, said he fled from Afghanistan to Turkey in August 2021 to escape persecution by the Taliban, which threatened to forcibly recruit him as punishment for the women’s rights activism of his father and sister. For more than two years, he lived in Istanbul as an undocumented migrant while awaiting the processing of his resettlement to Canada.

He was arrested by Turkish police in 2024 due to a lack of immigration status and is currently subject to an enforceable Turkish deportation order to send him back to Afghanistan.

The refugee sponsorship application, submitted in June 2022 by his aunt in Brampton, was first refused in May 2024 because Lali did not provide the “refugee status determination” document issued by the Turkish government or the United Nations Refugee Agency that certified him as a refugee.

Lali had requested exemption from that requirement because Turkey doesn’t allow the UN agency to provide refugee certificates in the country and the regime’s “hostile treatment” of single male Afghan asylum seekers would put him at risk of detention and deportation to Afghanistan if he came forward, according to court submissions. The officer rejected his request.

Lali and his sponsors appealed the refusal to the Federal Court, which in March 2025, quashed the officer’s decision and sent the case back for reconsideration by a different officer. The application was refused again a month later and another court challenge followed.

The dispute over ‘very similar reasons’

At Wednesday’s hearing, government lawyer Hillary Adams pointed out that the court sent the case back for reconsideration last year because the original court records were missing 600 to 700 pages of documents.

Since the first judge never reviewed the substance of the initial refusal, there should be no issue replicating the refusal reasons, she told Judge Darren R. Thorne. “The (refusal) reasons are largely similar and there’s no problem with that.”

Adams said when an officer is faced with almost exactly the same submissions under the same legislative and policy constraints, there will be “very similar reasons, if not the same reasons.” The editing and additions in the new refusal, no matter how small, suggested there’s thoughtful consideration in the assessment, she added.

“The fact that there’s redundancy or copying or similarity … does not rise to the level of a reasonable apprehension of bias,” she argued.

The judge then questioned if one could conclude that the reviewing officer did give a fresh assessment of the case as required, with “the large swaths of the decision essentially being the same.”

In response, Adams reiterated that any editing in the reviewing officer’s decision reflected that the matter had been thought through and there would be “obvious similarity” in the analysis because officers were bound by the rules and the law that they must apply.

“The fact that it is identical language, does that give one pause?” asked Thorne.

“With respect to the parroting of someone else’s language, we do that all the time,” Adams replied. “That doesn’t mean there’s no independent thought going into our written submissions before the court … I don’t think it’s that black and white.”

Koltun, lawyer for Lali, said his client presented legal arguments of the four key factors why he should be granted humanitarian relief and added one more factor to support his re-assessment: his alleged torture and treatment by the Turkish government during his subsequent attempt to make a refugee claim.

In the second refusal, said Koltun, the reviewing officer copied and pasted from the previous analysis with the exception of the new argument because the issue was fresh and not before the first officer.

“An extensive level of copying tends to indicate that the decision maker did not engage with the issues and did not make an impartial and independent decision” before them, noted Koltun.

Lali and his lawyers have asked the court to quash his resettlement refusal and order immigration officials to exempt him from the refugee certificate requirement and reconsider the application. The judge reserved his decision.

Canada rejected his immigration application twice. He’s challenging the decision in court over its ‘copied and pasted’ refusal