megastu12 said:
@ tito and soj,
I have applied for PR since February 2007, at berlin office because i used to live in holland. After going through the process, up to submission of documents, which i did last week. I received a letter from CIC, berlin, that they cannot continue proceesing of my application as i am not a national of germany or netherlands, and i had not been admitted for at least a year before my application. It further stated that my application will be sent to accra office. Now, i am so devastated, as i do not know if accra office will just continue with the processing as i have submitted all my updated documents and also paid all government processing fees, or it will place it on a queue, again.
How long do you think the whole process will take, as i ought to have been finalised within the next 6 months, if it were to remain in the Berlin office.
Thanks for your anticipated answers.
Apologies to posters on this particular thread, i do know this wasn't addressed to me, but i would like to shed some light on this as someone who's had a first hand experience of the mis-application of the rules. This part of the one year residency requirement has been misinterpreted by CiC many times. This is what the rules actually say
"R11(1) requires that all applicants for permanent residence (other than applicants who come
under Part 8 of the Regulations – Convention Refugees Abroad and Humanitarian Protected
Persons Abroad) must submit their applications to the visa office responsible for:
• the country where the applicant is residing, if the applicant has been lawfully admitted to that
country for at least one year; or
• the applicant's country of nationality, or if the applicant is stateless, their country of habitual
residence other than a country where they are residing without having been lawfully admitted"
The issue here is that Visa offices often misinterprete "lawfully admitted" to mean the applicant must have resided legally for over a year, whereas what the manual explicitly says is that the applicant must have been given lawful admission of over a year, hence Mr XYZ can apply in his third month of his two year work permit in say - UK for example. The deciding factor is the length of admission stamped onto the applicants passport. So, it all depends on how long you were admitted for in Holland, and on what basis? If it was as a visitor, then CiC has taken the right decision;if it was on some sort of work permit of a year plus, then u might have a leg to stand on. But the bottomline is that either way, it won't be that easy to ask them to send back your file to Berlin, since you are no longer resident in Holland. Most of the checks will have to be done by the Accra office for what CiC calls Program integrity reasons.
To your last question, the procedural manual says that files being transferred to other visa offices have to maintain their original application date as their lock-in date, so you will be squeezed in to the Accra queue as at the time you applied in Berlin, which means that you'll be on the same level as those that applied in 2007 in Accra, and that is just no good. Two people i know suffred the same fate from london visa office, but it worked out in their favour cos they got their PR in 6months from Accra, but thats under bill c-50 - the new rules.
Have a look at http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/manuals/op/op01-eng.pdf for more information about this.
And lastly, if your occupation happens to fall among the list of 38, i would re-apply under the new rules if i were you, and see how it goes. It is allowed to have two applications running at the same time, and you will be notified to withdraw one when you get to the finals of whichever file gets processed quicker. This suggestion is on the basis that funding wouldn't be an issue for you, cos I do know that it is an expensive venture.
