MONTREAL: Canadian leaders, not the country's refugee system, should decide the fate of soldiers who have deserted the US military to apply for asylum in their northern neighbour, according to a support group.

One of those soldiers, Jeremy Hinzman, will go before Canada's refugee board on Monday for a hearing on whether he qualifies for asylum. The adjudicator who will decide the case has already announced he will not consider the argument that Hinzman did not have to serve because the US-led war on Iraq was illegal.

"While that may provide good grounds of appeal, if an appeal is necessary, Jeremy would have preferred to be able to bring that up," said Lee Zaslofsky of the War Resisters Support Campaign. "It's a disappointing and obviously mistaken ruling," he told IPS from Toronto.

At the same time, "this is a political question," added Zaslofsky. "This is not simply a question of 'can we get the refugee board to agree that Jeremy and the others are refugees under the definition'? The issue here is, will Canada let these guys stay?"

Hinzman arrived in Canada on Jan 3 with his wife and child, fleeing his army unit, the 82nd Airborne Regiment, just days before it was to depart for Iraq. The army specialist, who had already served in Afghanistan, had applied to be discharged or reassigned as a conscientious objector (CO) but the military denied his request.

Going through the CO process can take up to a year, says Bill Galvin of the Washington, D.C-based Centre on Conscience and War, a member of the GI Rights network. "That's a year during which you have officially gone public saying you cannot in good conscience do this, and yet you are required to (serve)," he added.

Galvin told IPS that despite years of submitting Freedom of Information Act requests, the centre has yet to receive official figures from the defence department on the number of applications being made for CO status. But he says his group is now processing a "couple dozen" submissions and estimates that another 10 organizations country-wide are doing similar work. Some soldiers apply independently, he noted.

But Galvin, himself a CO during the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s, cautions soldiers who have left their units without permission (making them absent without leave, or AWOL) to think hard before heading to the US-Canada border. -Dawn/The Inter Press News Service.