A Twitter thread by Bella Sankey, Director of @DetentionAction
My organisation @DetentionAction has supported tens of Afghans in detention in recent years. The highly traumatised people we have come across in detention frequently arrived in the UK as unaccompanied children having fled the most unimaginable horrors in Taliban controlled parts of Afghanistan including their parents being killed.
The @ukhomeoffice response to this was too often to reject asylum claims and then begin removal proceedings against them when they reached 18. The UK has forcibly removed tens of thousands of Afghans back to Afghanistan in the past decade. Until 2016 there were monthly charter flights, delivering people back to grave risks and to the catastrophe we are now seeing unfold.
As well as those refused asylum, anyone with a conviction and a sentence of over 12 months would be brutally removed, including young people who received convictions that were clearly linked to past traumatic experiences. Until the end of last week, the Home Office position was that people could safely relocate to Kabul and the Courts have frequently failed to properly challenge this claim.
There remain thousands of undocumented Afghans in the UK and people waiting on an asylum decision. We have one client currently still in detention.
The UK Government must immediately release any Afghan nationals held in immigration detention and grant leave to remain to all those in the country. This should not be difficult and should be done immediately and without delay.
@BorisJohnson‘s trailed resettlement claim must be generous and made as accessible as possible to all those who are now at grave risk in Afghanistan. As well as interpreters that include journalists, human rights advocates, women & anyone the Taliban targets for persecution.
It should also include ALL those that have been forcibly removed to Afghanistan in the past twenty years. The UK has badly failed these people and put them in a life-threatening situation. It must use its best endeavours to bring them back.
In tomorrow’s Westminster debate, MPs across the aisle must also unite to call for @pritipatel‘s Nationality & Borders Bill to be scrapped.
The Bill would criminalise an Afghan woman that flees the Taliban today and gets herself and her children to the UK. Under the provisions in the Bill, she would have committed a criminal offence. Her ‘irregular’ route to the UK would automatically make her claim for asylum inadmissible & she would be liable to indefinite immigration detention at @pritipatel‘s pleasure, possibly in an overseas detention centre.
This Bill was always an affront to common sense, human dignity & international law. But against the backdrop of what is now happening in Afghanistan its regressive authoritarian dangerousness cannot stand up to scrutiny. It must be scrapped or @pritipatel must go.
This is not academic. Many Afghans have and will make ‘irregular’ journeys to the UK. Between 2018 – 2020, according to the Home Office’s own figures, Afghan nationals were the fourth-highest Channel crossers (after Iraq, Iran & Syria).
Anyone who is at risk of persecution, torture & death who arrives in the UK must have their case properly heard. This is a huge test. The disaster in Afghanistan is a watershed. We can deliver a resettlement programme to be proud of & recast our asylum system to be humane, believing & welcoming.