On 4 February 2021, the BPP Human Rights Unit hosted refugee rights experts for a virtual panel on asylum, detention and the ‘hostile environment’, Ellen Alde reports. Guests heard from Toufique Hossain (Duncan Lewis), Pierre Makhlouf (Bail for Immigration Detainees), Marina Brizar (Talent Beyond Boundaries) and Ruvi Mutyambizi (For Her Child).
Setting the tone for the evening, host Hannah Anson brought attention to the stories emerging from the Home Office’s new emergency asylum accommodation sites in former military barracks. In the week prior, the High Court had ordered that an asylum seeker and potential victim of human trafficking be urgently rehoused from the Napier barracks, finding the accommodation inadequate and the ‘prison-like’ conditions and COVID-19 risks wholly unsuitable. The first portion of the event addressed these developments within the asylum and immigration landscape, simultaneously highlighting the work undertaken by our speakers’ organisations. In the second portion, students had the opportunity to hear from two former refugees working to improve the experience for asylum seekers in the UK.
Toufique Hossain opened the presentations with a brief overview of the UK asylum system and the stages of intervention that can be accessed by legal representatives. As asylum seekers await a decision on their status, asylum support is available in the form of accommodation. Unfortunately, issues with previously contracted accommodation sites and COVID-19 have resulted in an increase in contingency accommodation, such as the ‘re-purposed’ military barracks. Hossain noted that these camp-style accommodation sites are unprecedented in the UK, reminiscent of the Greek hotspot sites and the French camp in Calais.
Duncan Lewis’ approach to the emergence of these sites is two-part: judicial review of the broad policy and individual transfers. Hossain, the firm’s director of public Law and immigration, told students that the firm has brought a judicial review against the Home Office, challenging the ‘lawfulness’ of the decision to house individuals in these conditions. Foremost, they contend that there is no adequate screening ongoing to identify disabilities and serious vulnerabilities. Individuals held at these sites are largely of the same demographic; of African and Middle Eastern origin and having fled conflict or previously been subjected to torture, rape and/or sexual abuse. Second, the firm says the Home Office are in breach of their public sector duty under s 149 of the Equality Act for failing to handle racist incidents. The firm suggests that the intentional segregation of asylum seekers to rural areas amounts to unlawful discrimination on grounds of race. Finally, the asylum seekers are deprived of their liberty contrary to Article 5 of the Human Rights Act (HRA). Although they are not formally detained, the firm says that the sites amount to de facto detention as daily far-right activity on the outskirts of the sites, a curfew and enduring mental health trauma create a sense of false imprisonment. Lawyers at the firm continue to seek individual transfers out of these sites whilst the team awaits a decision on the preliminary issues of the judicial review.
Next, students had the opportunity to hear from Bail for Immigration Detainees’ (BID) head of legal strategy, Pierre Makhlouf. The work at BID centres on the applications for bail, deportation and general issues of detention. Makhlouf placed bail in the context of wider public law actions, wherein determinations of ‘unjustified’ detention at the Immigration Tribunal are taken into account in a judicial review challenge of ‘lawfulness’. Thus, immigration lawyers at BID account for the eventuality of public law interventions in preparing bail cases.
In addition to bail work, BID operates an advice line for general information and referrals. Importantly, they conduct policy and research for various projects, including separated families, discrimination against prisoners facing immigration removal, and the implications of Brexit for EEA nationals. Makhlouf emphasised that BID’s interventions at the High Court and the Supreme Court add legal understanding to cases where there are implications for the wider body of people in detention. In Kiarie & Byndloss ([2017] UKSC 42), BID intervened in a ‘deport first, appeal later’ case (s 94B, Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act), arguing a breach of the procedural guarantees of Article 8 HRA. BID proved to the Supreme Court that out-of-court appeals made it impossible for individuals to engage with the appeals system. The tribunals were unwilling to engage with video calls and assessors were unable to conduct meaningful assessments, as EU/EEA nationals continue to be subject to the ‘deport first, appeal later’ policy. In addition to interventions, BID’s casework serves as a meaningful resource for the courts.
Marina Brizar of Talent Beyond Boundaries (TBB) moved the conversation from work undertaken on asylum specifically, to her organisation’s efforts to assist displaced persons in a complementary pathway of labour mobility. Brizar’s work is motivated by her experience as a resettled refugee from Sarajevo to Australia, and her later work as an immigration lawyer. Starting from the premise that managed migration programmes tend to categorise individuals by skilled, humanitarian and family migration, TBB fields the grey area to open up talent mobility to displaced persons. Commissioned by the Obama State Department, TBB created a Talent Catalogue to break down the perception that refugees and displaced persons are inaccessible to employers. Their work addresses the barriers to equitable access by creating a platform for the private sector to utilise, whilst ensuring protections are in place and promoting the autonomy, independence and empowerment of their candidates.
Our final speaker for the evening, Ruvi Mutyambizi, is the founder of For Her Child and a former refugee from Zimbabwe. Students heard the heart-breaking and inspiring refugee experience Mutyambizi encountered in the UK which ultimately saw her child taken from her care and placed for adoption by the court. She said:
“I had two choices, to either accept that there was something inherently wrong with me as a person that had made me highly inadequate in the view of the professionals…or was I to listen to my maternal instinct, my belief in equality and human rights and my very intense sense of betrayal by way of law and a hostile environment…”
Mutyambizi’s new initiative, For Her Child, encourages the use of the more accepting terminology “sanctuary”, as opposed to “asylum”. The organisation is purposed with assisting mothers and children who have sought sanctuary in the UK and as a result, are living precariously. They provide ‘expression packs’, allowing children to play with their mothers and develop their expression in a healthier way than their circumstances normally permit. Furthermore, she aims to change the approach used by professionals working with refugee families, something she re-emphasised in response to a question from the audience. Speakers at ‘Reframing the Rights of Refugees’ broadly approached the asylum and immigration landscape from the premise that access to the legal system needs to be made more accessible to refugees and asylum seekers. Students were encouraged to join this area of the legal profession and to re-think the approach and the rhetoric of the asylum and immigration system in the UK.
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