Desperately Seeking Asylum tells the story of one man's attempt to secure political asylum in Britain, and raises some fundamental questions about the way the system works. Edward Stourton reports. The asylum debate is often conducted beneath a shroud of prejudice - prejudice of course against immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, but sometimes also prejudice about the countries from which they come.
Turkey has a well-established reputation as a state that abuses human rights.
An abuser of human rights That reputation is the principle obstacle to Turkish membership of the European Union, and there is plenty of objective evidence to support it. In the fifteen years of Turkey's war with the Kurdish PKK an estimated thirty thousand people were killed, hundreds of thousands of people were driven from their homes and torture was commonplace. Asur Saribel claimed political asylum in Britain in 1996. He told the British authorities that he had been politically active in Istanbul, and had been involved with the underground movement Dev Sol. His asylum request was turned down twice, but finally allowed on appeal in 2000.