Judicial Judgment of the Iraq War: United States Armed Forces Deserters and the Issue of Refugee Status
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As with any conflict, the Iraq war has seen a spike in the number of deserters from the United States military. Convenience and relative ease of access has made Canada an attractive destination for these individuals. Yet at least some of them are not content to simply reside in Canada under guise, and since 2004 a number of U.S. Army deserters have claimed refugee status under international and Canadian law. The instant article seeks to confront this issue: whether, on an objective reading of the relevant law, U.S. deserters from the Iraq war can qualify as refugees. After reviewing the international framework for refugee protection, including the UNHCR Handbook, and the relevant Canadian law, including the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Federal Court’s decision in Zolfagharkhani, the individual cases of the deserters will be examined. These cases, except for those of Joshua Key and Corey Glass, have ended with disappointment for the deserters, who have so far been denied refugee status in Canada. The final section criticizes the Key and Glass decisions for incomplete and inaccurate reasoning, before independently judging the claims of the deserters under the principle of “state protection” and the language of paragraph 171 of the Handbook. It is the conclusion of this article that the deserters cannot establish any facts that would rebut the presumption of state protection, a failure that is dispositive of their claim. Nonetheless, I also conclude that they have failed to establish that the U.S. military conduct in Iraq falls within the purview of paragraph 171. That conduct, although it does include violations of human rights and humanitarian law, is not widespread or systematic, nor is it indicative of either an official policy of the United States or indifference of the military. Thus, these deserters are not deserving of refugee protection in Canada, even if a political solution to their dilemma might still be forthcoming.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.022 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".