Article content continued

Emmanuel protested that he was one of the few passengers with naval training and had only taken over the ship’s command after its Thai crew abandoned it off the coast of Thailand. He said he steered it to Canada for humanitarian reasons, not for any material benefit.

The criminal case against him was then paused while the Supreme Court of Canada dealt with a related case. It ruled in 2015 that Canada’s human smuggling laws were overly broad, and shouldn’t be applied to people acting for humanitarian reasons.

The trial for Emmanuel and three other Sri Lankans finally started in October 2016. The jury found him not guilty, accepting his evidence that he took over the ship to save the lives of those on board.

In February 2017, he then sought judicial review of his deportation order, arguing that the 2015 Supreme Court case meant the immigration board had wrongly decided he was inadmissible. But such applications are supposed to be filed within 15 days of the decision; Emmanuel’s was filed five and a half years later.

In his decision, Chief Justice Paul Crampton ruled that the criminal proceedings did not qualify as a good enough reason for exempting Emmanuel from the deadline, given the application could have been filed in the nine months between the deportation order and the laying of criminal charges, or even immediately after the 2015 Supreme Court decision.

He noted that other Sun Sea passengers who had been ruled inadmissible filed challenges immediately, well before the Supreme Court ruling.