Hostile Environment
By: Weapons Of Reason
Tags: Government, Human Rights, Migrants, Asylum Seekers, Refugees

Imagine for a second that you are an asylum seeker — you have travelled away from everything you know, towards a place that will try to prevent you from entering — often having experienced things that are difficult to fathom. You don’t have a clear understanding of the asylum-seeking process (labyrinthine in form, the laws and regulations are shifting constantly) and your English-speaking skills are bare. You have a justified fear of authority, and PTSD makes recalling information extremely difficult. You are put in a room with a couple of strangers, a lot of dense paperwork in complex language, and told to “briefly” state your reasons for being there. Given how the interview is carried out, and the instructions which are provided to interviewees at the time, this is problematic, says Draft. “They are told to be really brief and stick to the bare bones of the story. It is a real contradiction”.

A lack of credibility is the most common reason for the Home Office to reject an asylum claim, but the Home Office goes out of its way to discredit asylum seekers’ evidence. What a person says in their screening interview is used as a litmus test for the authenticity of their story thereafter. Any inconsistency with that record is used as a way to disparage the credibility of the asylum seeker. “They have a sort of formula,” explains Draft, often quizzing appellants, not to elicit facts, “but so as to impugn them morally in some way.”

A harrowing story needs to be backed up with hard evidence, but providing proof of imprisonment or torture can be near impossible. “When someone has proof of being trafficked,” says Zoé, a lawyer with the organisation Safe Passage, which works to help unaccompanied child refugees access their legal rights, “I feel a sense of relief.” And yet, having tracked down such evidence, the Home Office will “find a way to be suspicious”, says Draft, often declaring evidence inadmissible for convenience.

“Since the 1990s, UK governments have pursued ever more restrictive policies toward asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants, in an attempt to disincentivise settlement.”

Things are improving though, says Lou. For example, “Women are now not routinely expected to sit through their Home Office interviews and disclose details of rape and torture with their young children in the room, which used to be commonplace.” Rape will also now be considered torture in case law and in asylum appeals, which was not the case either when she started working in this area. “So those are small but important wins on principle.”

The 1951 Refugee Convention requires that to be granted asylum, a person be unable to return to their country of origin due to a “well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinions”. Country guidance reports are commissioned by the Home Office to provide information about the political landscape and realities of a particular country. If a person’s experience doesn’t match with the context on file, their case becomes immeasurably more difficult to prove.

Ethiopia’s country guidance report featured heavily in Habtamu’s case from both sides. The Home Office wanted certain information from 2007 disregarded; at more than a decade old they said it should no longer bear weight on the case, and that Habtamu’s detention, lasting only three days, placed him outside of the necessary risk category that would prevent his return home. His defence pointed out that the country guidance remained good, despite its age, and that the Home Office’s Country Policy and Information Note, Ethiopia: opposition to the government, October 2017, actually pointed to things getting worse for the Oromo in the intervening years.