Beninoise said:
Hi, I am new to the forum. Please, can anyone help me figure this out. I am a Canadian citizen, sponsoring my husband who is from Uganda. My husband has a child from a previous relationship in the custody of the mother's family so we have included her as a non-accompanying dependent on the application. However, upon asking them to give us information (birth certificates, identity documents, photos), they refused. They don't want my husband to have anything to do with her. (Parental rights are a messy business in Uganda). What do we do when they ask for a medical for her and they refuse to cooperate? Is there any way to get out of providing this information for CIC? We don't want a situation where we can't sponsor her at a later date but it is the one thing preventing us from completing the application. Must we hire a lawyer to force them into cooperating?
First of all, it's important that the child be declared, even if some documents are not available. Otherwise, your husband may be inadmissible for misrepresentation.
Unfortunately, the answer seems to be that in this case the child won't be able to be sponsored later, unless one of the following things happens:
- the visa officer waives the medical examination for the child because it's unnecessary (I'm not sure in what circumstances this would happen, but CIC mentions "an administrative decision", "policy reasons" and "administrative error" as possibilities); or
- at a later time, once your husband has regained custody of the child, an application is made to sponsor the child to come to Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.
In cases where an applicant has made his best effort to have a child examined but was unable to, an exception may be made for later sponsorship if it's in the best interests of the child. Unfortunately, I only know that this is possible in theory - I don't know how often it works. For this you might need to speak to an immigration lawyer to find out what your chances are at a later time. If the idea is to wait until the child is eighteen or almost eighteen, it seems unlikely this will work since people are pretty independent at that age.
There's more detailed information in the CIC manual "OP 2" (Overseas processing manual 2) in points 5.10-5.12. It addresses the situation you're in directly, and unfortunately it doesn't look very positive, even though it's clearly not your husband's fault.
www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/manuals/op/op02-eng.pdf
Also, I have a hard time seeing how the law in Uganda (or any country) could force the mother to allow the medical examination if she has sole custody. On the other hand, I suppose the argument could be made that the mother was acting against the child's interests by removing from her the possibility to live in Canada later on (before the age of 22) if she so chose. Sorting that problem out may be as difficult as sorting out the custody problem in the first place. But if there's no realistic prospect of getting custody, there is at least a clear argument that this is in the child's interest. I guess this is a question for a Ugandan family law specialist.
The bottom line is that, in my opinion, you should talk to both a Canadian immigration lawyer and a Ugandan lawyer.
