***Blocks Ex-Chieftain’s Asylum Bid
A Canadian Federal Court has delivered a landmark judgment branding Nigeria’s two dominant political parties the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as terrorist organisations under international law, while rejecting an asylum plea from a former insider.
Justice Phuong Ngo upheld an earlier Immigration Appeal Division (IAD) decision that found Douglas Egharevba inadmissible to Canada over his decade-long membership in both parties, ruling that affiliation alone — even without direct involvement in violence — meets Canada’s threshold for links to terrorism and subversion of democracy.
Egharevba, a PDP founding member in 1999 who defected to the APC in 2007 and stayed until 2017, entered Canada later that year. But immigration authorities flagged his political history, citing intelligence and reports tying both parties to election violence, ballot theft, intimidation, and politically motivated killings.
Central to the ruling was the PDP’s violent record during the 2003 state elections and 2004 local polls under then-President Olusegun Obasanjo and Vice-President Atiku Abubakar. The IAD found — and the court agreed — that PDP loyalists engaged in widespread electoral malpractice and killings, with party leadership benefiting from the violence and failing to intervene.
Justice Ngo said such actions met Canada’s definition of “subversion of a democratic process” under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, stressing that Canadian law recognises Nigeria’s elections as democratic events flawed or not and undermining them for political gain constitutes subversion.
The court also affirmed Canada’s expansive view of “membership” in a proscribed organisation: mere affiliation during periods of documented violence is enough to trigger inadmissibility, regardless of personal conduct.
Egharevba’s argument that all Nigerian parties are plagued by violence and that the PDP’s actions should not be labelled “subversion” given Nigeria’s electoral flaws was dismissed. The court ruled his asylum claim effectively dead, clearing the path for deportation.
The decision marked one of the clearest statements yet by a foreign court equating Nigeria’s ruling and former ruling parties with terrorist entities, and sets a precedent for denying sanctuary to their former members abroad.