Roghayeh Azizi Mirmahaleh will not be sent back to Iran at the end of the week.
She has been granted a temporary residency permit that is good for two years.
Her lawyer Stephanie Valois told Radio-Canada she has been released. Mirmahaleh had been detained since her arrest by the Canada Border Services Agency.
Canadian immigration officials detained Mirmahaleh on Tuesday and her deportation was scheduled for next week.
The decision to grant Mirmahaleh permission to stay in Canada comes a day after Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre – a former federal minister of immigration – publicly mused that her case could have been settled with a ministerial order allow her to remain in the country and that he was in contact with authorities about her case.
Federal officials acknowledge that Mirmahaleh was imprisoned for three years in Iran in the 1980s because of her support of the political dissent group Mujahedin-E-Khalq (MeK). They also acknowledge that her husband was executed by the Iranian authorities in 1988 because of his involvement with MeK.
But MeK was once listed as a terrorist group by Canada, and because of that, Mirmahaleh is considered inadmissible to Canada as a refugee. MeK was delisted in 2012 — the year Mirmahaleh came to Canada.
When Mirmahaleh’s claim for refugee status was rejected in 2015, a pre-removal risk assessment was requested to determine the risk of imprisonment, torture or death should she be deported to Iran.
Without conducting an interview, and despite Mirmahaleh’s protests against the Iranian regime’s human rights abuses, an immigration officer concluded there was no such risk.
Mirmahaleh’s lawyer had requested a stay of deportation, so that a federal court judge could review the risks of returning Mirmahaleh to Iran, where a Concordia professor, Homa Hoodfar, was imprisoned for several months last year, and where a Canadian-Iranian photojournalist, Zahra Kazemi, was tortured to death in 2003.
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