(Staff)  A refugee claimant who says she was baptized in an underground church in China has won an appeal in Canada and will not be forced to return to China--yet. 

According to her testimony before an Immigration and Refugee Board hearing, Pin Xian Xin, 32, who lived in Guangzhou, China, was invited by her cousin to attend an unregistered church that met in a member’s home. After attending for six months, she was baptized in 2001. 

She and her husband already had one child when Ms. Xin found she was pregnant again. This violated China’s strictly enforced one-child policy. Fearing she would be subjected to a forced abortion and sterilization by vigilant health authorities, she said she fled to another part of China.

However, family planning officers started making inquires about her, advising her husband that she was to report for an IUD check-up, she said. Instead a relative arranged for her to be smuggled out of China.

Ms. Xin arrived in Toronto in August 2005, pregnant with her second child, and immediately made a refugee claim. She applied for refugee protection on the grounds she would be persecuted in China both for violating China’s one-child policy and for having been baptized in an unregistered Christian church.

A month later she joined the Logos Baptist Church in Markham. Her Canadian pastor wrote a letter of support for her refugee bid, saying she regularly attended Sunday services and was an enthusiastic member. Her baby was born shortly afterwards.

At a hearing in 2006, Ms. Xin was examined by a board adjudicator about her Christian faith. The adjudicator, Ms. Lily Oddie, found it implausible that for the first seven months of their marriage, Ms. Xin never told her husband of her church attendance. When her husband, who was not a Christian, learned of it he feared they would be persecuted but she continued attending church despite the danger, Ms. Xin said.

"The claimant's evidence is that as a Christian she understood the Ten Commandments, yet she allegedly withheld information on her underground religion during an extended period in which she met and then married her husband thus breaking the commandment, 'Thou shalt not lie,'" Ms. Oddie said in her IRB ruling.

Justice Leonard Mandamin of the Federal Court who heard the appeal, disagreed.

"Silence, strictly speaking, is not a lie," he says in his ruling. Further, he wrote: "That a believer would persist in professing her faith in the face of adversity is not surprising … especially having regard to the nature of religious belief and the history of Christianity."