Asylum and the "War on Terror"

I am a Human Rights advocate and the legal representative of a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

He entered the UK in October 2001 and claimed asylum the following day. His application was considered in March 2002 and was refused. His appeal was heard in September 2002 and was unsuccessful.

In 2003, my client’s wife fled the DRC with their 3 children to France and applied for asylum there. However, before her application could be decided, she left France for the UK to be with her husband. In May 2004, she gave birth to their fourth child in a Bristol hospital. At approximately 3 a.m. on 29 November 2004, police burst into their flat. They bundled my client’s wife and their four children into one car and sent her back to France. My client was taken away in a second car and was placed in custody pending his forcible removal to the DRC.

In December 2004 my client made a fresh application for asylum and in May 2005, was released on bail subject to his reporting to Police at regular intervals. This also failed. He then went "underground".

My firm was instructed by this young man in November 2006 and on 15 November 2006 we submitted an application on his behalf to the Home Office for discretionary leave to remain on humanitarian grounds to which we have never received any response. This is by no means unusual. The Home Office have a backlog of more than 400,000 odd cases of this kind. I generally advise my clients to let sleeping dogs lie on the basis that the longer they stay here, the harder it will become to remove them. In fairness, whenever I have pushed the Home Office for a decision, they have responded very quickly - always negatively.

On reviewing my client’s copious file I noticed that in January 2006 the Home Office did actually attempt to persuade the French authorities to allow him to travel to France to be reunited with his wife and children, where she has now been granted refugee status. However, it was refused.

For several months, I tried to find further information about this but the Home Office could not (so they claimed) locate the file. This is also not unusual. Potentially embarrassing cases tend to disappear for months on end; sometimes forever.

I had hoped that I could have reunited my client with his family in time for Christmas. It would have made a happy story. The problem is that because my client stopped reporting to the Police, the Border & Immigration Agency (as it is now called) claim that this gives them the right not to provide us with any information that might assist him to get to France. They say that our client must return to the DRC and apply to travel to France from there.

Forced returns to the DRC of refugees whose asylum claims have been refused have been suspended, because the courts have been satisfied that for the time being, it is far too dangerous for them. This cuts no ice at all with the Home Office. The BIA may have a new name but it is still permeated by the same arrogant, hateful, pitiless bastards e.g. "It is not believed that you were held in prison and tortured as you claim because you are now unable to give us the name of the prison governor's daughter's best friend's budgie."

Last year a 40 year old man official from Angola's state oil company decided to take his “wife” (who he had purchased from her uncle when she was just 14 years old) to England. Discovering the passport he had obtained for her, with an airline ticket and the money he had drawn out of his bank for the journey, she decided to make her escape to Britain without him. On arrival at Heathrow she was immediately arrested and detained for several months at Yarls Wood. Every effort was made to obtain her release and it was eventually necessary for me to bring an application before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Even though this young girl was a minor, the Home Office alleged that her birth certificate was a forgery, despite the fact that it was obtained for her by the Red Cross not long after she had become orphaned.

She was forcibly returned to Angola before the European Court could even begin to consider her case and on arrival in Luanda she was arrested. The Brits had taken away her passport and sent her back with a travel document that did not however prove her nationality. Because she is from a rural area she does not speak much Portuguese, they would not believe that she was from Angola. They then put her on a place to the DRC but when she arrived in Kinshasha they sent her back to Luanda. She was afterwards detained for several months where she was repeatedly beaten, abused and raped by her captors before being released after her resultant pregnancy began to show and presumably made her less desirable. She has now returned to Britain where she has to start all over again.

Her lawyer, as well as her friends, including a young biochemist who wants to marry her,all live in Nottingham so naturally the Home Office have decided to send her 300 miles away to Glasgow.

Our tabloid press and the xenophobia on which it thrives has little sympathy for situations like this even though it is the UK's obligation under international law to grant asylum to refugees. Of course the number of asylum applications is an enormous strain on the country's resources but we need to remember that we are directly responsible for the present crisis.

Our wonderful New Labour government knows full well from the experience of Chile under the Pinochet regime, that the free market policies of Hayek and Friedman which have long since become globalised could only be imposed by acts of the most repressive savagery including the arbitrary arrest, torture, disappearance and murder of thousands.

Almost everyone agrees by now that the so-called war on terror is nothing but a sham and a pretext for a war of terror being waged by governments not against "terrorists" but against their own people, the purpose of which is to justify the steady erosion of our civil liberties and gradually criminalise dissent, because governments know full well that as the poor of the world become poorer still, violent resistance to authority will increasingly become their only option.

I also happen to be a Roman Catholic and the doctrine of my church as set out in our "catechism" very clearly sets out the basis on which armed insurrection against an authoritarian state may be justified. Not only this, but we are told that we have an absolute moral obligation to oppose such governments. Yet under our new laws, any form of violence for political ends is regarded as "terrorism".

Under Tory and New Labour governments alike Britain has allied itself with a neo-fascist regime whose belligerence and aggression arguably represents the greatest threat to liberal democracy since the Third Reich, indeed, a regime presided over by a man whose grandfather indeed helped to bankroll the Nazi Party. In so doing, we have made common ground with the torturers and assassins of Darfur, Chechnya, the DRC, Zimbabwe, Israel and Pakistan. The excuse of every tin-pot dictator from Milosevic to Musharaf and Mugabe to Museveni for murdering their political opponents, has been that they are merely fighting “terrorists”. And it is this that is the root and cause of Europe's asylum crisis and the reason why we now have an absolute moral obligation to do something about it.