Fahamu Refugee Legal Aid Newsletter: essential reading
The Fahamu Refugee Legal Aid Newsletter is a monthly forum for news and reflection on the provision of refugee legal aid.
Focusing on the global south, it provides a unique range of news stories, organisation profiles, and legal explanations to assist those providing free legal advice on asylum, refugee and human rights cases across the world.
Joe Bryce, an immigration solicitor based in Scotland, described the newsletter as “Extraordinarily valuable and interesting, a real Aladdin’s Cave”.
The newsletter follows recent developments in the interpretation of refugee law; case law precedents from different constituencies; reports and helpful resources for refugee legal aid NGOs; and stories of struggle and success in refugee legal aid work. The newsletter reaches an estimated readership of over 500,000 people, and is distributed through Pambazuka News, the Forced Migration Discussion List, and the Fahamu Refugee Programme Website.
The newsletter also has a Facebook page and past issues can be found on the FRLAN blog.
The January 2012 issue of the newsletter features Mike Kaye of Still Human Still Here explaining its initiative of providing formal commentaries on UKBA’s operational guidance notes, and an organisational profile of none other than NCADC!
Organisational profile: NCADC makes the case against deportation from the UK
Contributed by Lisa Matthews, an asylum and human rights campaigner working in London, UK.
At the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCADC), we are faced with the hard sell. Our campaigns highlight the plight of individuals at risk of administrative removal or deportation from the UK, and attempt to stop those individuals being removed.
Garnering widespread support for immigrants’ rights is always challenging, but the climate in the UK is becoming increasingly entrenched. The Conservative–Liberal Democratic coalition government has opted out of the revamped Qualification Directive (the implementation of the Refugee Convention in European law), and is encouraging hostility to the concept of human rights by aligning it with the idea of an overly meddlesome European Union. This is combined with — or is in response to — the poor economic conditions that traditionally foster xenophobic and racist anti-immigration views, and widespread cuts to organisations supporting migrants in the UK.
Working with people at the end of the line in terms of legal processes has additional considerations. The public and the press do have some time for the concept of asylum, when it is presented in its simplest form of people fleeing war, genocide or persecution needing sanctuary. So how do you convince people that a campaign for somebody who has lost their asylum claim is valid? Those of us who work in the refugee sector in the UK know all too well how flawed the adversarial legal system is in deciding asylum and human rights cases. But the general public doesn’t know this. Many people trust that if there is a legal system assigned to deal with these cases, and someone has been through the system and not been named a ‘refugee’, that person does not need to be here. They believe the asylum system produces justice.
In far too many situations, this is simply not the case. Access to justice is increasingly harder to secure. Legal aid for immigration cases (non-asylum) will be cut under the legal aid reform bill currently going through British parliament. This means that issues such as family reunion (the right to which is incorporated in the refugee convention) and appealing deportation will not be covered by legal aid (in the UK context, deportation usually refers to foreign nationals who have served criminal sentences. In legal terms, those whose asylum claims have been refused are ‘removed’ rather than ‘deported’). The fees legal aid lawyers get paid have already been slashed, and many legal centres are closing down due to lack of funds. The two biggest providers of legal aid for refugees in the UK — Refugee and Migrant Justice and the Immigration Advisory Service — have both gone into administration in the last two years.
More and more people are unrepresented in a system in which the odds are stacked against them. There is a culture of disbelief at the UK Border Agency, and notoriously poor quality of first-instance decision making. NCADC, through supporting individuals, families and communities at risk of removal from the UK, seeks to raise awareness of these obstacles to justice, and explain that many individuals being forcibly removed from the UK are at risk of mistreatment and persecution back home. A refused asylum claim does not mean, in real terms, the absence of risk.
It is an uphill struggle. Despite human rights groups reporting on the torture of returned Tamil asylum seekers in Sri Lanka, the UK government has forcibly returned scores of Tamils since the end of the civil war, using charter flights shrouded in secrecy. A recent Justice First report demonstrated the risk to those removed from the UK to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, yet the UK Border Agency is determined to deport Congolese, even young women with no family or social contacts to protect them in the ‘rape capital of the world’.
As well as working closely with local groups across the UK to support migrants to run campaigns for their rights, anti-deportation campaigners in Britain also need to be part of a global community. Once people are deported, it is hard to keep track of what happens to them. But it is crucial that we know, so that the UK government cannot say it is safe to return people when it is not; to rebut country of origin guidance relied upon in legal cases; and to make a compelling case against deportation.
