Special report: Tamil asylum-seekers to be forcibly deported

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deportation, forced removal, rape, Sri Lanka, Torture, trauma, war, War Crimes

Special report: Tamil asylum-seekers to be forcibly deported

Dozens of Tamil asylum-seekers will be forcibly removed from Britain on a secretive deportation flight today despite credible evidence that they face arrest and retribution on their return.

A chartered plane, PTV030, is due to take off at 15.30 from an undisclosed London airport and fly direct to Colombo. Human-rights organisations have called on the UK Border Agency to halt the flight on the grounds that Tamils who are known to be critical of the Sri Lankan government have been brutally treated following their return.

The forced removals come as Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was the architect of Sri Lanka’s final victorious push three years ago against the Tamil Tigers – a military offensive which defeated the brutal insurgency group but also led to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians – flies into the UK to join the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations.

Human Rights Watch has documented 13 credible cases over the past two years in which failed Tamil asylum-seekers from Europe have been tortured after landing in Sri Lanka, and warns that those cases are likely to be “just the tip of the iceberg”.

Mr Rajapaksa’s government has been accused of committing war crimes during the military offensive and of continuing to preside over a culture of impunity in which kidnap, extra-judicial killings and torture are still commonplace, particularly in the heavily militarised Tamil areas in the north.

The Foreign Office’s latest report on human rights describes Sri Lanka as an area of “serious concern” when it came to abuses. But that has not stopped the UK Border Agency, which is under political pressure from the Government to ramp up deportations, from forcibly removing hundreds of Tamils in recent months.

The agency is notoriously secretive when it comes to forcible removals, rarely announcing them until the very last minute and providing few details about who is on board.

There have been at least four chartered planes in the last six months delivering Tamils back to Sri Lanka.

Some of those on board today’s flight include people who have overstayed their visa and immigrants who have been convicted of a criminal offence. But it also contains dozens of ethnic Tamils who have had asylum bids turned down and are at risk of political persecution.

The Independent yesterday spoke to one Tamil man in his mid-twenties who is currently being held in Yarl’s Wood detention centre and is due to be on today’s flight. He said there were six people on his wing who were failed asylum-seekers who thought they would be at risk of torture or worse if they were returned. “Everybody is crying,” he said. “We all know about cases where people have been tortured or killed after they were returned. Why is the UK government doing this?”

The man, who requested his identity remain anonymous for fear of reprisals if he is removed, said he travelled from Jaffna to Britain in 2006 to escape the violence that had plagued northern Sri Lanka for three decades. He added that both he and some of his fellow deportees played prominent roles in recent protests in London against the Sri Lankan government.

“Whenever there were demonstrations the Sri Lankans would send people down to photograph the protesters,” he said. “They know exactly who we are. That’s what scares us.”

The UK Government insists that those who are forcibly removed are individually assessed to make sure that they are not at risk of torture on their return. But Human Rights Watch says they have at least three cases of Tamils who had been forcibly removed from the UK and subsequently tortured.

“There are likely to be many more cases, because these are the people who have managed to find their way from Sri Lanka to the UK, and that we have managed to interview,” said David Mepham, director of HRW UK.

“The UK should suspend the forcible removal of Tamil asylum-seekers pending a review of its processes for assessing asylum claims by Tamils.”

A UK Border Agency spokesman said: “The UK has a proud record of offering sanctuary to those who need it, but people who do not have a genuine need for our protection must return to their home country.

“We only undertake returns to Sri Lanka when we are satisfied that the individual has no international protection needs. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled not all Tamil asylum-seekers require protection.”

Tamil returnees are raped, whipped and burned

Suthan knows all too well how hollow assurances that Tamils deported back to Sri Lanka are safe can be. He first fled to the UK five years ago after the Sri Lankan Terrorist Investigations Department accused him of having links to the Tamil Tigers.

During his asylum application he presented medical evidence showing that he had been beaten with sticks and burned with cigarettes but his request was turned down.

Last year he was placed on a chartered flight and returned to Colombo. He was questioned on his arrival at the airport in the presence of an official from the British High Commission and was later released.

But the interrogations continued. After trying to return home he was picked up by security officials and claims he was tortured, including being whipped with electric flex, burned with cigarettes and having his head immersed in a bag filled with petrol.

After paying a bribe he escaped to the UK again and is now represented by Freedom from Torture, which has used medical evidence to document numerous instances of deportees being brutalised on their return to Sri Lanka.

“This situation has gone on long enough,” says Keith Best, Freedom from Torture’s chief executive. “Forcible returns of refused Tamil asylum-seekers must be halted until the UK Government is sure that they will not be delivering people into the hands of their torturers.”

Even the asylum panels have recognised that torture continues despite the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war. In late 2010 the Immigration and Asylum Chamber accepted that a Tamil woman who had been returned to Sri Lanka by the UK authorities was tortured and raped. A second 33-year-old man was also granted asylum last year after a tribunal accepted that he had been beaten and burned with hot metal sticks after his return.

Nonetheless the British Government has stepped up deportations.

Jerome Taylor

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Tamils deported to Sri Lanka from Britain being tortured, victim claims

The human spur to action on asylum

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deportation, destitute, detention, human rights abuses, persecution, rape, suicide, Torture

The human spur to action on asylum

Some clear facts and figures have been put into the public domain, thanks to a new report, Refused: the experiences of women denied asylum in the UK. In this research, 48% of women seeking asylum in Britain had been raped in their home countries. Half had experienced arrest or imprisonment. The vast majority were refused asylum in the UK. None felt able to consider returning to their home countries, as they were too scared of what would happen to them if they went back. Of those refused, more than half were made destitute – left with no means of support or housing. A quarter were detained. And the emotional impact of refusal was also revealed: more than half of women refused asylum had contemplated suicide.

These figures have received a certain amount of attention. But how urgently do figures communicate the need for change? Can you see the human faces behind the facts? This is always the problem when we talk about human rights abuses and persecution. Whether we are looking at massacres or mass rapes elsewhere, or homelessness or detention in this country, it is too easy for people to disappear behind statistics.

Campaigners are aware that we need to take our own sense of the individuality of the people we work with to a wider audience, but it often seems almost impossible to do so. In a world bludgeoned by fast, hard, visual news, how do we tell a story that makes others stop and listen?

Indeed, at a time when policy seems driven by reflecting and magnifying people’s reluctance to empathise with the most vulnerable, many people appear to almost take pride in their ability to keep the walls around their sense of wellbeing high and not to let the situation of the unemployed or the disabled or the asylum seeker knock a hole.

The problem doesn’t lie only with the indifference of some audiences; it’s also that these stories are by their very nature hard ones to tell. I co-wrote this particular report at the charity I run, Women for Refugee Women, so I know it was tough for each and every woman who participated in the research to communicate her experiences of persecution and her journey through the asylum process.

If we want to take those stories further, we are often pushing women beyond the limits of what they can bear. As one woman said to me when I asked her to talk to a journalist about her experiences of rape and torture in the Congo: “If I talk about it again I have to live it again, and again. It makes my head hurt and my heart burst. I can’t do it.” I felt ashamed of asking her to do so.

Yet it is only by communicating the individual story that we can begin to transform the rhetoric around us that condemns an asylum seeker to be seen as part of a flood rather than as an individual. I can tell you that there are fewer than 20,000 people coming to the UK to seek asylum each year, or that asylum makes up only an estimated 4% of net inward migration, but I wonder if you’d be convinced by those figures to join those campaigning for a more humane asylum process.

However, if I tell you that a woman I know called Lydia fled torture and rape in prison in Cameroon to come to this country to seek asylum, but was imprisoned here and threatened with deportation, you might let me talk to you for a bit longer. If I could bring you to meet Lydia herself, I would challenge you not to be moved by her situation.

Indeed, at the launch of the report in parliament, I saw the audience sit cool and calm through a presentation of the figures, but I saw them moved to tears when Lydia Besong got up to speak. Lydia is a writer who has fought a long – and only recently successful – public campaign for her right to be recognised as a refugee here, and the response she received made me remember why it is that, although we need the facts and the figures, it is human connection that creates the spur to action. Because it’s only if we can recognise that these women are just like you and I that we can understand the importance of building a more just asylum process in which they receive a fair hearing.

Child asylum seekers ‘still being imprisoned’ by immigration service

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age, Child asylum seekers, Children, deportation, detainees, detention, trauma

Child asylum seekers ‘still being imprisoned’ by immigration service

A report by the Refugee Council to be published this week accuses the immigration service of continuing to detain child asylum seekers by wrongly classifying them as adults.

The report, Not a Minor Offence, has been welcomed by other groups working with refugees and asylum seekers who are growing increasingly concerned by the numbers of age dispute cases. Last year one child spent almost three months locked up before it was finally accepted that he was not an adult.

Evidence that children were being psychologically damaged by their experiences in the asylum system led the government to announce an end to the controversial practice of keeping under-18s in detention centres two years ago this weekend. Yet the practice is continuing and no one knows how many children have been illegally deported as adults.

Guessing someone’s age is controversial, but the Refugee Council believes officials are not erring on the side of caution. In many cases agencies find out about a child whose age is disputed only when another detainee inside a centre reports their concerns about an unaccompanied child being locked up.

Faisal was only 15 when he arrived in the UK. Judged to be an adult, he spent several days in police cells and was left to sleep rough on the streets before finally spending a month in a detention centre.

Talking about his experience still causes him acute distress. “I was 15. I didn’t have any documents but I know my age. I didn’t understand why it was so important.

“The immigration officer was banging his fist on the table saying ‘No, this is not your age’. By the end I was so tired and upset that I said OK, I will be whatever you want me to be. When I was first in the police cell I was crying because I couldn’t believe it. They came and banged on the door and shouted at me. One policeman drew his finger across his throat. They would all say ‘You’re going back, we’ll be sending you back’ and point at me and laugh. At the detention centre they locked me in a room by myself. I didn’t know anyone. I was very scared I was to be sent back to Afghanistan. I would rather die.”

The number of unaccompanied child asylum seekers arriving in the UK is dropping – from 3,645 in 2007 to 1,277 in 2011 – but no one knows why.

Judith Dennis, advocacy officer at the Refugee Council and author of the report, admitted the detention of children on the grounds that their age was in question had not changed, but said that establishing someone’s age was not easy. “It’s a difficult task but we should be erring on the side of caution. The official guidelines for unaccompanied children state they should not be detained unless ‘their physical appearance and/or demeanour very strongly indicates that they are significantly over 18’.

“That is clearly not what’s happening. All children should be referred to a social worker so that a proper assessment can be made. It’s not something you can decide in a few minutes, and I think it’s quite worrying this is what seems to be happening in a lot of cases.

“Given that it’s well established the harm the experience of being locked up can and has caused children, and that the government has accepted it’s unacceptable to lock up children, why are we not taking this more seriously?”

Hashi Syedain, of the independent monitoring board at Harmondsworth immigration removal centre, said the problem was serious. “It bears repeating again and again – in 2012 the UK is locking up children in Harmondsworth in what is effectively an adult male prison. They can remain there for weeks on end because the system doesn’t care enough to stop it happening.

“It is true that some young people who are over 18 claim to be younger in the hope of being allowed to stay in the UK, but this does not excuse the UK Border Agency’s failure to prevent children from ending up in detention.

“Another year passes in which nothing changes and children continue to find themselves in detention. It is not good enough.”

For Faisal, the intervention of Refugee Council workers meant he is at college and living in semi-independent hostel accommodation, but the trauma of his teenage years is far from over. When he turns 18 he may still be sent back to Afghanistan. “I try to study, but it’s hard to think of the future,” he said. “I feel very hopeless. I’m scared they will come for me and put me back in detention or deport me. I cannot go back to Afghanistan. If I had not left I would have been dead. If I go back, I will die.”