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Breaking News:Canada Court Declares APC, PDP Terrorist Organisations, Rejects Asylum of Fleeing Ex-Party Member
A Canadian Federal Court has upheld a landmark ruling declaring Nigeria’s two dominant political parties the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as terrorist organisations, while dismissing the asylum appeal of a former member, Douglas Egharevba, over his decade-long affiliation with both parties.
In a judgment delivered on June 17, 2025, Justice Phuong Ngo dismissed Egharevba’s bid to overturn a Canadian Immigration Appeal Division (IAD) decision that found him inadmissible under security provisions of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA).
Canada’s Minister of Public Safety argued that both the APC and PDP were deeply implicated in electoral violence, political killings, and subversion of democracy acts that amounted to terrorism under Canadian law.
Court records show Egharevba joined the PDP in 1999, defected to the APC in 2007, and remained there until 2017. He entered Canada that year, openly declaring his political history. However, immigration officials flagged his affiliations based on intelligence reports linking both parties to widespread electoral malpractice and politically motivated killings.
The IAD focused on the PDP’s violent record during the 2003 and 2004 elections, when the party held federal power under then-President Olusegun Obasanjo and Vice-President Atiku Abubakar. The tribunal found that PDP members and loyalists engaged in ballot box snatching, voter intimidation, and killings of opposition supporters, while party leadership failed to act against the violence meeting the legal threshold for subversion of a democratic process.
Justice Ngo upheld the tribunal’s finding that under Canadian law, mere membership in such organisations even without personal involvement in violence is sufficient grounds for inadmissibility.
Egharevba’s argument that electoral violence was common to all Nigerian parties was rejected. The court ruled that even flawed elections in Nigeria qualify as a democratic process, and undermining them constitutes subversion.
The decision is one of the clearest foreign court pronouncements equating Nigeria’s ruling and former ruling parties with terrorist entities under international law, setting a precedent that political affiliations abroad can block asylum, regardless of individual conduct.
Egharevba now faces imminent deportation from Canada.