By Emily Dugan
Published: 22 October 2007 http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article3084346.ece
Thousands of people are forced to spend years living in abject poverty on the streets of Britain's cities after fleeing persecution in their own countries, an independent asylum inquiry has heard. The destitute have no access to help from the state as they have not been granted asylum, yet they prefer to stay in Britain rather than return home because they fear of being tortured or killed.
Senior lawyers, doctors and immigration officials even claim such destitution is, in effect, now being used by the Government as policy, in an attempt to force desperate people out of the country.
There are at least 280,000 people living in poverty in Britain after having their leave to remain refused. Some of them are appealing those decisions. Some just go completely underground, taking their chances on the streets of the UK with no money or shelter.
Living on the margins, these outcasts have been "failed" by the place where they thought they would be safe, the inquiry was told. Many sleep rough; few have access to the healthcare that UN legislation says they have a right to. Sir John Waite, a former High Court judge and chair of the Independent Asylum Commission that will report to the Government next year, said: "I think it's a serious omission that we haven't looked earlier at this very pressing problem. There is a significant element of the population subsisting while awaiting hearings or asylum claims, especially after rejection. And some of them are suffering serious hardship either because they don't understand the system or because the system fails them."
The Commission met last week in Manchester to hear evidence from immigration experts as well as direct testimonies from those who had experienced the struggle of surviving in the UK first-hand. They described the extremes of poverty they suffered while living in fear of returning to their countries of origin.
In an impassioned plea to the Commission, Iranian Afshin Azizian, whose asylum case is still undecided after 12 years, said: "Thousands and thousands of asylum seekers have been made destitute. I ask those in the Home Office to think, if you were to spend one day in my shoes how would you like to be treated? We never had much of a voice until recently. If you don't have a piece of paper from the Home Office you're not considered human. How can you call yourselves civilised?"
The 36-year old, who was beaten by Revolutionary Guards in Iran, fled after his activist friends were brutally tortured by the regime. Until recently he was sleeping rough, before finding sanctuary in a monastery. Sleeping everywhere from laundrettes to parks, he said that his living conditions had been better in Iran. "I was not poor in Iran – I did not come here for your money but I was seeking refuge. I would never have believed that one day I would be starving for food, and I would never have imagined that people would get this kind of treatment in this country. We're human beings. You signed the [European] Convention on Human Rights: do you not respect your own signature?"
Financial support is cut off after 21 days for those without children whose asylum case has been rejected. Immigration experts have called this a "deliberate tool" to rush people out of the country, often before enough evidence has been collated to ensure the safety of their return.
Sandy Buchan, chief executive of Refugee Action, condemned the country's treatment of failed asylum seekers: "It seems the Government is using destitution as an instrument of policy. It's no accident. It's very much a deliberate tool of government. It's morally unacceptable to force people into utter destitution, and the most desperate and degrading circumstances when people are frightened of what awaits them when they return home.
"Destitution is an unworkable policy that has completely failed to deliver on its objectives," he added. "It means the Government loses contact with asylum seekers. Each day they are destitute, the chances of return become more remote."
Ruth Heatley, an immigration solicitor, said that part of the problem was in the phasing out of Exceptional Leave to Remain, a policy that used to grant temporary residency to those whose safety in their home country was still in question. In 2002, one in four initial asylum cases was granted this temporary permission; by 2005 this had been reduced to just one in ten.
"This is wrong and inhumane, and the policy doesn't work: people would rather face destitution than persecution," she said.
Dr Angela Burnett, who was at the hearing representing Medact, which campaigns to improve health worldwide, said healthcare provision for many asylum seekers was so poor that it broke UN conventions.
"Torture survivors are being denied access to healthcare due to an inability to pay. This contravenes the UN Convention Against Torture, ratified by the UK, which obliges states to provide as full a rehabilitation as possible to torture survivors," she said, adding that thedifficulty of understanding a labyrinthine set of regulations meant that even those eligible for healthcare missed out.
"The complexity of the current and proposed rules means that some people who do have full entitlement to free healthcare, such as people who have active asylum claims, have erroneously been excluded or charged."
The Independent Asylum Commission is conducting a nationwide review of the UK asylum system and will present a report to the Government in 2008. Last week's hearing in Manchester, was the sixth of seven nationwide hearings and was specifically aimed at tackling the issue of poverty amongst asylum seekers and refugees.
Mary Namkussa: 'It was like being an animal'
Mary Namkussa fled Uganda after she was raped and beaten by soldiers hunting for rebels. Her brother-in-law had been a rebel, but she had not known.
After months of being held captive and repeatedly raped by soldiers, the 40-year-old mother of two was released and pushed out of a car on to the road. She tried to resume life as normal in the pharmacy she owned with her husband, but her home was raided and her husband disappeared.
When she escaped to England in 2003, her Home Office interview was delayed as she was being operated on for internal injuries caused by being raped. Her solicitor asked the GP for a medical report, but he never sent it, and the Home Office refused her entry. At an appeal hearing in 2005 she had a medical report, but again she was denied asylum. She was left homeless and penniless, and for two and a half years she has survived on Red Cross food parcels.
"It is difficult for me to put into words how I feel about being destitute," she said. "I think living the life of a destitute person is like living like an animal, not a human being."
"If I was returned I'm sure I would be targeted. Who will help me? I'm not a public figure or significant, so no one from the West would help me if I was imprisoned. I would like to be able to work so that I can do something instead of just roaming or sitting still. I used to work, I am not disabled, I am an educated and hard-working woman. I can use my brain.
"I think about my children, my family and my position every day, and every day I cry."
Ibrahim Zukrya: 'I was harassed and abused'
Ibrahim Zukrya was captured and tortured in prison after photographing a bomb site in Darfur. The 47-year-old teacher, who had already been in trouble for encouraging his students to be politically active, was tied upside-down and beaten as he was questioned. He escaped during a prison transfer, when his van had an accident in the jungle. After a trek by camel through the deserts of Chad and Libya, he found someone who transferred him by ship and lorry to the UK in 2003. His application for asylum was refused, and after an appeal was turned down he was told to return to the Sudan. Mr Zukrya preferred destitution to being returned "to be killed by my enemies". He slept rough. "Drunk people would come up to me and harass me with racist comments. The only organisation I could get aid from was the Red Cross, who used to give me a parcel of food and £5." Finally, after being imprisoned at a detention centre for two days, he found a new solicitor to represent him, and was granted asylum in September last year.
British guards 'assault and racially abuse' deportees
By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor
Published: 05 October 2007
Hundreds of failed asylum-seekers deported from the United Kingdom have been beaten and racially abused by British escort teams who are paid to take them back to their home countries,
The scale of the alleged abuse has been uncovered in a joint investigation by The Independent and a group co-ordinating the representation and medical care of failed asylum-seekers.
A dossier of 200 cases, collated by doctors, lawyers, immigration centre visitors and campaign groups over the past two years, has unearthed shocking claims of physical and mental mistreatment of some of the most vulnerable people in our asylum system.
Many of the claims include allegations of physical and sexual assault and racist abuse which took place during the long journey from Britain to their home countries.
One of the cases of alleged abuse is that of Armand Tchuibeu, a Cameroon national who claimed asylum in the United Kingdom in February 2000. His application was refused last year. He was then arrested and prepared for removal.
On 29 January 2007 he was collected from Tinsley House removal centre in East Sussex by four escort officers who drove him to Heathrow to catch a 9pm flight to Cameroon, as pictured on the front page from CCTV footage inside the van.
He claims handcuffs were applied to his right arm. Mr Tchuibeu says he told the guards that there was no need to handcuff him as he had no intention of obstructing his removal. But he alleges that officers started to manhandle him and, while his arms were held, one of the officers punched him in his ribs and on his neck and told him words to the effect "You will go to your fucking country today, we will fucking show you what illegal people deserve in our country". Another officer is alleged to have held his head down so they could apply a leg strap.
Eventually, Mr Tchuibeu convinced the escort officers he had been injured and the deportation was aborted. Mr Tchuibeu was taken to the Hillingdon Hospital where he was examined and treated. His knee was placed in a cylinder cast which he wore for four weeks.
Mr Tchuibeu, who is being represented by the London solicitors Birnberg Peirce, is now bringing a civil claim for assault against the security company.
The authors of the 200-case dossier accuse the Government of turning a blind eye to the abuse in order to meet arbitrary targets for the forced repatriation of asylum-seekers.
They say some of the cases they are investigating are worse than the torture and abuse the refugee suffered before making their asylum claim in this country.
In nearly every case, the allegation of mistreatment is made against private security contractors employed by the Government to carry out enforced removals of asylum-seekers.
Mr Tchuibeu appears to be far from an isolated case.
Milton Apollo Okello, 25, who was tortured by the Ugandan security services, claims that, after his asylum claim was rejected, he was frogmarched on to a plane and tied to his seat by British guards.
But when word came through that he had won an eleventh-hour reprieve, Mr Okello claims he was taken to a van and beaten and racially abused. Mr Okello said: "The driver opened the sliding door and I was pushed into the middle of the seat. Two of the officers got on one side of me and the others came in on the other side. Officer A then punched me hard in the face and he said "These black monkeys don't want to go back to their country ..."
A 24-year-old man who escaped to Britain after being imprisoned and tortured in the Republic of Congo claims that when he refused to sign a document presented to him by his escorts, three of them forced both hands backwards. One of the escorts is said to have told him: "This is the key to going home."
A doctor who later conducted an examination of Mr A, wrote: "The fourth metacarpal of the left hand has undoubtedly suffered a fracture. This is highly consistent with excessive use of force during or after a failed attempt to remove him from the UK."
Dr Frank Arnold, a volunteer doctor with the Medical Justice Network, who has examined more than 100 detained asylum-seekers, says many of the injuries suffered during removal are not taken seriously enough by the British immigration authorities.
He said: "Some of these injuries have been so bad that police officers who saw them appear to have been genuinely shocked. But it is my experience that medical staff who examine asylum-seekers when they are taken back into detention have greatly underestimated the severity of the injuries, including fractures and nerve damage from forcible traction on handcuffs."
In the past two years government figures show that 1,173 attempts to remove failed asylum-seekers, such ase Mr Tchuibeu have failed.
The majority of those are due to the disruptive behaviour of the detainee on board the aircraft or because of an eleventh-hour judicial intervention. But others fail because of injuries suffered or the deterioration in the physical or mental health of the asylum-seeker during the removal process.
Last month Mr Tchuibeu was returned to the Cameroon. After a police investigation, no one has been charged with an offence. The company denies the allegations of brutality made against its staff.
A spokesman for the Border and Immigration Agency which contracts the security companies to help carry out the removals said: "Any allegations of misconduct are thoroughly investigated and all allegations of physical and racial abuse are referred to the police."
Three security firms are on the Government's approved list for the forced removal of failed asylum-seekers. They are Group4Securicor, ITA Group and GEO, an American company
A spokesman said Group4- Securicor was aware of complaints made but said they had never been proven – adding the company would condemn any such action. GEO and International Training Academy both declined to comment.
Terror of Flight 101: An echo of Orwell
The flight leaves Heathrow airport's Terminal Four, every Wednesday bearing the number KQ101. The echo of George Orwell's Room 101 is unhappily appropriate. On this Kenya Airways jet, many asylum-seekers' worst nightmares do come true. KQ101 is the deportation flight chartered by the British Government to return refugees to Africa. According to human rights groups, this flight carries out the most Africa-bound removals of unsuccessful asylum applicants to the UK. It has also become a flight that has attracted allegations of abuse by guards. From Nairobi the detainees are flown all over Africa where they are handed over to security and immigration authorities.
Last night the Home Office said it had a number of contracts with airlines for scheduled and charter flights which involved the removal of failed asylum-seekers. A spokeswoman from Kenya Airways confirmed it had a contract with the Government to fly failed asylum seekers to Africa. "We have not received any complaints about these flights," she said.
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