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An end to trickery? The Refugee Council’s proposals
The Refugee Council’s proposals for a new. fairer asylum process (Towards a National Refugee Strategy) are below. But first:
The government says that there is no need to make a dangerous journey across the English Channel to seek asylum in the UK. Instead, refugees should use the safe routes provided by the government.
The numbers game and other trickery: virtually no safe routes
When the UK government set up the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme in January 2022, it said it would resettle 20,000 people in an unspecified period of time. But it turned out that that number would include people already here before the scheme was announced, let alone set up, and who therefore had no need for protection under the scheme. By 23 February 2023, 7,609 of them had been included. This means that only 12,391 places were provided under the scheme, not 20,000.
Trickery? Of course. Here’s more:
Except for a small number of people under arrangements with the British Council and others, there is no way for an Afghan nationals to apply to be included in the scheme. This is why friends of mine were told by a legal firm that getting three vulnerable female members of their family out of Afghanistan and away from the clutches of the Taliban would be virtually impossible.
Here’s a bit more:
Another scheme (the UK Resettlement Scheme) replaced several resettlement programmes, including the scheme to rescue victims of the Syrian conflict. Good news? Not really. For this scheme, too, “has no application process”, says the Refugee Council (see Strategy, below, p. 6). So there are safe routes – but you’ll be lucky to get on one.
No wonder the English Channel is overcrowded.
Here are the Refugee Council’s proposals.
Punishing refugees: a policy quietly dropped? No, it’s still a crime to travel by boat
According to the article below, the government has “quietly dropped” the policy they’ve been boasting about for months as the gold standard way of stopping asylum claims by people who have, in their desperation, crossed the Channel in small boats to get here. Originally, their claims for asylum were going to be heard but, even if they were successful, they would be granted “Group 2” status, get only temporary leave to remain and would soon be deported. Only those with passports or visas, or who had managed to find one of what the government calls its “safe routes” (they are becoming increasingly difficult to detect, even with up-to-date technology) would be given Group 1 status, indefinite leave to remain, the right to family reunification and eventually be able to apply for UK nationality. That was the plan. It was called “differentiation”. People who travelled in unauthorised ways had to be punished.
All this has now been “paused”, there will be no “differentiation”, according to Robert Jenrick, the Immigration Minister. Now, migrants who arrive on boats and get their asylum claims granted will get “the same conditions” as the ones with passports or visas, etc. Instead of being punished for travelling on a small boat across dangerous waters, Group 2 asylum seekers will be “aligned with Group 1”. Why the pause? The government claims it will speed up the processing of the backlog of 50,000 people who have been waiting since June 2022 for their cases to be decided. These include 15,000 from countries such as Afghanistan and Sudan, who are more likely to have their claims accepted and will now be processed through questionnaires rather than interviews.
But whatever the reason, Enver Solomon (Executive Director of the Refugee Council) is understandably relieved and has expressed agreement with the move: “It’s the right decision”, he said, “to pause the differentiation policy that treats refugees based on how they got to the UK rather than on their need for protection.”
But to leave it there, of course, would be to rejoice too soon, and the Refugee Council knows that. A pause is just that. A pause. And a Home Office spokesperson has already warned us that the Illegal Migration Bill, which is currently making its way through parliament, will definitely not be paused. Instead, the spokesperson reminded us, it will “make sure that people who come here illegally won’t have their asylum claim considered in the UK and instead can be detained and swiftly removed.”
That’s the policy. None of the politicians can stop it. Most of them don’t want to. The Labour Party is refusing to say whether it will repeal the Act in government. That means it won’t. Only the pressure of a mass movement against this cruel policy will get rid of it.
Can we build one?
Here’s a petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/634311
The Guardian article:
Bob Mouncer's blog 