If you are fleeing persecution in your own country and you want to apply for asylum in the UK, how do you do it safely? During a House of Commons debate on Channel crossings (see link below), Home Secretary Priti Patel gave the following assurance: the Nationality and Borders Bill, she declared, “does create safe and legal routes.”
It didn’t. And nor does the final Act.
In the same debate, the Conservative MP for Hertford and Stortford, Julie Marson, went further: safe and legal routes, she said, “are central and integral” to the Bill (ibid.).
They aren’t.
The debate took place on 5 November 2021. Home Office officials and ministers may have been surprised at Patel’s assertion — as it was certainly news to them. Still, they are pretty resourceful at the Home Office: by 5 April this year, junior minister Tom Pursglove was able to tell the charity MSF UK that safe and legal routes “do not form part of the Bill” (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/apr/17/fury-as-patels-borders-bill-found-misleading-on-safe-routes-for-migrants?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other).
And so it turned out.
Mind you, that didn’t stop the Home Office from publishing a “factsheet” with the title Nationality and Borders Bill: Factsheet. Safe and Legal Routes. It’s still on the Home Office website (see link below).
Misleading? Of course. That’s the Home Office.
In my previous blog, I tried to show a few of the problems associated with the various government schemes and their accessibility (https://bobmouncerblog.wordpress.com/2022/08/28/safe-routes-1/). Looking now at the government schemes described in the “factsheet”, it’s clear that many of the same problems raise their heads again. Top of the list is something called a “UK Resettlement Scheme”, which is described as a “global scheme” offering “safe and legal routes” to “the most vulnerable refugees around the world”. There is, however, a limitation on it which we’ve met before (ibid.): according to the government’s Policy Guidance to its resettlement schemes (see link below), the UK “will only resettle those determined by UNHCR to be refugees” (p. 3). We’ve seen that UNHCR referral comes in three forms: self-referral, internal referral and NGO referral, and we’ve also seen some of the obstacles to engaging with this process.
The “factsheet” gives another warning:
The number of refugees we resettle every year depends on a variety of factors including local authorities’ capacity for supporting refugees and the number of community groups willing to take part.
This seems to raise a question about the effectiveness of the next item on the “factsheet’s” list, the Community Sponsorship Scheme. This scheme claims to “enable communities to welcome and support people resettled to the UK through their eligibility for the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme”. Yet the “factsheet” warning suggests that such “enabling” does not include increasing the resources of local authorities to do the job or give any similar encouragement to community groups. Such groups should, it seems, already have increased their own resources:
Community sponsor groups need to demonstrate that they have suitable plans and resources in place to support a refugee or family.
The positive note in this second scheme is also undermined in that “eligibility” must surely be dependent, as in the first scheme, on UNHCR referral.
There are several other schemes in the “factsheet” of varying relevance and one (the route for British National (Overseas) status holders (BN (O)) has no relevance at all here. It may be that some schemes work for some people. But beware — a pattern has emerged which we would be foolish to ignore: a more detailed look may reveal that they have also been undermined in some way, like the first two. We may have reason to come back to them but, for now, they needn’t detain us any further.
So in terms of practicalities, what’s the situation on the ground? If, for example, you are a member of a minority ethnic group, about whom the government claims to be “particularly concerned”? Like the Hazaras. The Hazaras faced discrimination and violence in Afghanistan long before the Taliban came on the scene and, as DUP MP Jim Shannon told MPs in a debate on 6 January 2022, when the Taliban ruled the first time Hazaras “faced targeted violence, and many fled as refugees … in search of safety” (see link below). But the Taliban returned to power in August 2021 and, by the time of the debate, Shannon’s concern was that
There has been a resurgence of attacks on the Hazara community since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. Hazara schools and religious sites have been bombed, medical clinics have been targeted, and Hazara civilians have been murdered by the Taliban and ISIS-K (ibid.).
These concerns were shared by Labour MP Fleur Anderson, who worried that Hazaras in the UK
have no way of knowing whether their family members are in the system … It is very unclear whether these people are going to be safe despite the fact that they are in hiding and in fear of their lives” (ibid.).
Little seems to have improved since then. It is still the case that if you are a UK citizen anxious to bring close family relatives to safety in the UK in the current Afghanistan crisis, you could be forgiven for abandoning hope. The Afghan Pro Bono Initiative (a partnership of NGOs and law firms which offers free legal support in such cases) gives the following advice:
[T]he routes to the UK are incredibly limited. The route for bringing adult dependent relatives to the UK is extremely difficult and unlikely to be successful — there is a very high fee for the applications and the applicants have to prove they need care from the family member that they cannot obtain elsewhere (Pro Bono Initiative advice to a prospective client).
The “high fee” for the application will go to the Home Office which, in more ordinary circumstances, charges high fees at every stage of a family reunification procedure. What we have here, though, are not ordinary circumstances and the Home Office, rather than rising to the humanitarian occasion, has instead seized this new opportunity to cash in on human distress and desperation. There is also an additional obstacle: your family members must have some special need (unspecified, for flexible refusal purposes) before they stand any chance of being accepted. So much for the “right to family life” (European Convention on Human Rights, Art. 8; this is signed by all 47 members of the European Commission (including the UK), so is not confined to EU members and is unaffected by Brexit). Moreover, when it comes to particularly vulnerable people, nine expert groups on Afghanistan, in a parliamentary briefing in early August,
criticised the British government’s resettlement schemes as “unjustifiably restrictive”. They said it was deeply concerning that the government was currently not offering a safe route for many Afghan women and girls or to oppressed minority groups (The Guardian, 15/8/2022: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/aug/15/uk-treatment-of-afghan-refugees-continues-to-be-source-of-shame?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
It also seems that only the simplest possible case stands a snowflake’s chance of success. Pro Bono told one enquirer (a Hazara) that “unfortunately we are not able to assist because … the nature of your case is very complex.” It involved just four close family members. As to urgency, one of them was a child, a girl.
Look out next for Ukrainian refugees.
References
Channel crossings debate
Commons Hansard, 25/11/2021: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2021-11-25/debates/68AB08E2-DD41-4674-B7B1-602A7375524F/EnglishChannelSmallBoatsIncident#contribution-16AA51EB-AB65-4EE2-BA5D-F60E081717B6)
Policy guidance to resettlement schemes
Factsheet
Jim Shannon Debate
Bob Mouncer's blog 