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The Home Office versus Zimbabwean asylum seekers
By
Robert Gonouya
THE process
of applying for asylum carries with it an implicit expectation or belief
by the applicant in the morality, fairness and commitment to human rights
on the part of the host nation.
Indeed, under the UN Refugee Charter, this is expected of the host nation.
In the UK, it seems these basic rules do not apply to Zimbabweans.
There now appears to be sinister motives on behalf of the Home Office as it keeps appealing upon appeals even though the Asylum and Immigration Tribunals (AIT) has ruled in favour of thousands of Zimbabwean asylum seekers.
It is now the case that the basic concept of a tribunal no longer holds. The idea that a neutral party should decide in the dispute of two protagonists and that the decision is respected by all appears to be incongruent with Home Office objectives of keeping asylum figures low and deferring decisions indefinitely.
Could this be purely abuse of power by the Home Office? Evidence suggests that this may indeed be the case vis a vis Zimbabwean asylum seekers.
Despite undisputed accounts of torture, rape and widespread human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, the Home Office has, for example, in the test case of AA, continued to fight for the deportation of asylum seekers who have been granted leave to remain by the AIT.
For some individuals, their cases have been pending for more than 3 years. The Home Office has sought to deport thousands of Zimbabweans back to the despotic regime of Robert Mugabe despite the AIT ruling more than twice that it was unsafe to do so. Instead of respecting the decision of the AIT, the Home Office continues to appeal the decisions and seems hell bent to continue doing so until it gets the decisions it wants.
Whilst one understands that it is part of the Home Offices’ remit to protect British taxpayers from fraudulent asylum applicants, and that there should be some sort of appeal mechanism at its disposal, is it not abuse of power for it to keep appealing indefinitely? The objective seems to have moved from legitimate attempts to ensure that the AIT decisions are sound to attempts to frustrate and defer decisions indefinitely in order to meet performance targets relating to keeping refugee figures low. Even terror suspects seem to have more protection from abuse than Zimbabwean asylum seekers.
The process time lines for terror suspects are clearly defined. They cannot be held indefinitely and applications to the High Court for permission to extend detention or questioning are mandatory. In the Zimbabwean asylum cases the timelines seem non – existent or at best, blurred. A good number of Zimbabweans have been electronically tagged and are required to report to police stations either weekly or monthly, all have no right to work even 6 months on from their initial applications and are effectively isolated from their social networks.
Although the Home Office asylum statistics of the 1st quarter of 2006 state that 67% of appeals were dealt with up to completion within 6 months, it does not shed any light as to how long the other 33% of appeals take to complete . In AA’s case and those covered under it, the Home Office has been appealing now for more than 18 months on the AIT's decision to grant 5 years leave to remain to AA.
In his response to the 2006 asylum statistics, Maeve Sherlock, chief executive of the Refugee Council, remarked that, “Its easy to forget when all the focus is on statistics and targets that we’re actually talking about people who have fled persecution,…..maybe we can take a fresh approach and ….introduce an effective system that treats asylum seekers as human beings not numbers.”1
One wonders whether Zimbabweans will suffer the same fate of abuse as the nine Afghan asylum seekers who have now been living in the UK for more than six years with the Home Office still appealing to have them deported. The cost of their stay to the British taxpayer has been estimated at £15 million pounds.2
Considering that these are only nine people and their families, the figure spent is astronomical and underscores how the Home Office has failed to take policy decisions which protect British taxpayers from unnecessary costs. Admittedly, in their case, there are wider security implications such as those associated with terrorist activities, but it is absolutely inexcusable that the Home Office should be able to treat people in such a manner. Simply signing appeals forms and putting people’s lives in indefinite limbo is, I argue, tantamount to mental and physical abuse. With only one court, Field House, dealing with reconsideration hearings, hundreds of Zimbabweans with appeals pending have been advised by the AIT that no dates for the appeal hearings have been set as there is a huge backlog. Waiting for a date can take anything from eight weeks to three months. The point is that, there seems to be no timescales to which the Home Office must stick to when handling appeals. The appeals system appears predicated on an ‘as and when we can’ approach. Hardly a fair and humane way to treat those waiting.
Based on the previous deliberate delays by the Home Office and the subsequent amnesty it granted to about 50 000 asylum applicants in 2003, (after either losing files or acknowledging that the backlog was realistically impossible to deal with) it appears that no lessons have been learnt. Defending his amnesty decision, the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett argued that, “granting this group indefinite leave to remain and enabling them to work is the most cost effective way of dealing with the situation and will save taxpayers’ money on support and legal aid.”3
Today, the Home Office chooses to keep fighting cases which the courts have ruled to be sound and continues to waste taxpayer’s moneys by choosing to deny those with long pending cases the right to work and support themselves. Like Blunkett in 2003, I do not believe that it is the best use of taxpayer’s money to take these expensive longstanding individual appeals through the courts. Nor is it right that asylum seekers are stopped from rebuilding their lives for months and even years on end in the cause of political expediency on the part of the Home Office and the government.
Despite many having skills required in Britain such as nurses and teachers and their willingness to work and not sponge off the state benefits system, thousands are reduced to near destitution by the Home Offices’ antics. In addition, it is an accepted fact that Zimbabweans in diaspora are helping to look after their near destitute relatives back in Zimbabwe. After a visit to Zimbabwe, the labour MP for Vauxhall, Kate Hoey, in November 2005, tabled an early day motion calling for all Zimbabwean asylum seekers to be given the right to work. She had obviously been moved by the sheer scale of desperation and hunger that she witnessed during her fact finding mission. As of the 14th of May 2006, 79 members of parliament had signed the petition. Evidently, many MP’s share her serious concerns for Zimbabwean asylum seekers.
It is time for the Home Office to do the honourable thing and respect the AIT’S rulings in the case of Zimbabwean asylum seekers. Zimbabweans should be allowed to rebuild their lives and contribute to the economic, political and social life of Britain.
Robert Gonouya is a Zimbabwean and writes from the UK. He can be contacted at: gonouyarobert@hotmail.com
1 Caring uk, July 2006, no 122, pg31.
2 www.worldpress.org /14 May 2006.
3 The Guardian, 25 October 2003.
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