Home Affairs Committee
1. Executive summary
1.1 In this submission we respond to three key issues of relevance to the Inquiry on Asylum: the assessment of credibility within the decision making process, the use of country of origin information, and the system of support to asylum seekers.
1.2 We argue that positive asylum decisions are related much more to chance than the merits of an individual application, and demonstrate how multiple injustices—from the first asylum interview, through to a final refusal—amount to a decision making process that is itself not credible or accountable. We show that language barriers and the use of interpreters are a key factor in introducing inconsistencies into a person’s account. We demonstrate that the UKBA’s treatment of evidence to support asylum applications is entirely illogical, and argue that Country of Origin information is often unreliable and politically biased.
1.3 We highlight the problems caused by denying asylum seekers awaiting a decision the right to work, and demonstrate how the system of asylum support is unreliable, often leaving people without the support they are entitled to. We argue that the current model for Section 4 support leads to family separation and increases the vulnerability of people who are already marginalised.
1.4 As asylum seekers and refugees, our motivation is to help create a just asylum process where people receive the protection they need, and we appeal to the Home Affairs Select Committee to help us in this endeavour.
2. Introduction
2.1 Liverpool Asylum and Refugee Association (LARA) is a newly formed self-advocacy group for asylum seekers and refugees in Liverpool. We are here to give asylum seekers and refugees a voice; raise awareness about why people seek protection and how they are treated when they come to the UK; and provide practical and emotional peer support. People from a wide range of nationalities take part in LARA, including Gambian, Iranian, Cameroonian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Sierra Leonean, Sri Lankan and Somalian.
3. The assessment of the credibility of women, the mentally ill, victims of torture and specific nationalities within the decision-making process and whether this is reflected in appeal outcomes.
3.1 We feel that the cards are heavily stacked against those who claim asylum in the UK. There is much evidence to suggest that UKBA operates a deliberate policy of not accepting asylum seekers’ stories when they first apply. We feel that asylum represents an exception to the usual rule of law, and compel the UK Government to reverse this damaging practice. As one of our members commented: “you should assume people are telling the truth until they say something to prove otherwise.”
3.2 As we will argue below, our own experience tells us that positive asylum decisions are related much more to chance than the merits of an individual application, and we feel that multiple injustices—from the first asylum interview, through to a final refusal—amount to a decision making process that is itself not credible or accountable.
3.3 As people who have watched your news and heard your politicians claim that they are upholding Human Rights and democracy across the globe, we frankly feel betrayed.
Asylum Interview
3.4 Many asylum seekers find the experience of being interviewed more like an experience of interrogation. After experiencing the fear and trauma that led them to flee their home country in the first place, and an often difficult journey to arrive in the UK, asylum seekers feel unprepared for the adversarial nature of the asylum interview. They also feel unable or fearful of disclosing key details about their case to a uniformed official, after terrifying experiences with the police and army in their home country.
3.5 There is often no time to access lawyer after initial interview and before second interview, and no time to gather evidence. One man spoke about being called for interview before having an appointment with his lawyer, and feeling mislead by his Case-worker, who said having no lawyer present didn’t matter. His claim for asylum was later refused as he was unable to present enough evidence to substantiate his claim.
3.6 One man quoted his Interviewer, who had told him “I want to create a building with my questions. Not your answers.” The asylum applicant later reflected: “You can’t use this building. It has no door and no windows.” This perfectly illustrates UKBA’s approach to the process of establishing credibility and the way in which asylum applicants are prevented from giving a full account of their experiences.
3.7 We feel that the questions used by UKBA are designed to trap you into creating inconsistencies in your account, and that one’s credibility is irrecoverably damaged by responding to certain questions.
Use of Interpreters
3.8 We are convinced that language barriers and the use of interpreters are a key factor in introducing inconsistencies into a person’s account. Interpreters are often unprofessional and incompetent and there are not rigorous enough safeguards against this. One man spoke about an interpreter who was asked to translate some paper evidence he had brought with him to his interview. While the Case-owner was out of the room, the interpreter threw the evidence on the floor and claimed the applicant was using it to lie. How can we have faith that the interpreter is translating correctly and not sabotaging or compromising a person’s account when they make such judgements? Many of our members have experience of being given an interpreter who is fluent in a different regional dialect from their own, because UKBA do not realise the diversity of languages in a given country. This can either delay proceedings, or in the worse case scenario, lead to a person relying on an interpreter who has an inadequate grasp of their language. For example, one man from North Gambia was given a Mandimka translator when he actually spoke Serahula. Likewise, although there are 85 Ethiopian languages, UKBA assumes you speak Amhariec.
3.9 Translation is also an issue with regard to dates. An Iranian applicant found that the interpreter struggled to switch between the Persian and European calendars and this introduced errors into her account.
3.10 There should be much more rigorous exams for translators as their roles are so fundamental to establishing consistency and credibility within an individuals’ account. We also feel that asylum applicants should be made more aware by UKBA staff of their rights to terminate an interview if the translator is unprofessional or does not possess the right language level.
Cultural assumptions
3.11 We feel that UKBA’s reliance on dates as a measure of how credible your account is wholly undermines the claim that all UKBA Interviewers make at the beginning of the interview that they acknowledge certain cultural differences and forms of expression. Some Africans do not know their date of birth and it is also common for people to know only the year or month they were born in, according to a particular event that took place then (eg Queen Elizabeth making a visit to Gambia), and yet UKBA insists on people providing precise dates.
3.12 Someone who escaped from security forces via the roof of their house in a Middle Eastern country was told by their Case-owner that he did not believe this to be physically possible. Clearly, he had based this judgement on the idea of a European style pitched roof, forgetting that it is more than possible to flee across flat roofed buildings. This is yet another example of how UKBA staff claim to have a lot of knowledge about the situation in specific countries, but are blind to biases such as cultural conditioning or fail to even picture the lie of the land in that particular country.
Access to legal representation
3.13 Many asylum seekers struggle to access quality legal representation, meaning they are forced to attend court without representation. Many Legal Aid funded lawyers have a large case-load, and, coupled with funding restrictions, this increasingly means they are more likely to ‘drop’ asylum seekers whose cases they judge to be weaker. One example is a legal aid funded lawyer refusing to support someone to submit further evidence on medical grounds. We feel this amounts to another barrier to accessing justice.
3.14 After second refusal, an asylum seeker may apply to the Upper Tribunal, but they are only given 7 days’ notice to prepare and submit further evidence, during which time most people do not have any legal representation and no means of paying for private representation because they’ve been made destitute.
Treatment of evidence
3.15 We feel that the UKBA’s treatment of evidence to support asylum applications is entirely illogical: they demand supporting evidence for your claim, and then if you are able to provide it they use this as a reason to challenge your claim that you and your loved ones are at risk of persecution. An Iranian man gave the example of being a voting observer in the recent Iranian elections. He was asked to produce an original card to evidence this, and his family gave this to his friends to post to him in the UK. This was at great risk to the people involved, but UKBA used the fact that they had successfully sent it as proof that the level of risk was low.
3.16 Another Iranian spoke about UKBA dismissing the seriousness of the threat to their life. UKBA argued that the charge against them in their home country would lead only to a prison sentence, when in fact the application of the Law in Iran is so unpredictable and open to political and economic pressures that this could in fact amount to a threat of execution.
3.17 More broadly, there is a complete failure on the part of the decision making process to recognise the circumstances in which people flee, with no time to gather documents or proof. If you do manage to bring these with you, fear of having them in your possession when searched at the border means that you are sometimes forced to destroy them. As one man said, it is difficult to evidence the level of fear about what you know would happen if you didn’t leave: “You don’t wait until the war reaches you or a bomb drops on your house…”
New evidence
3.18 We feel that the way UKBA treats any fresh evidence demonstrates that once the system has denigrated you and claimed that you are lying, there is virtually nothing you can do about it. One man commented: “they won’t ever change their mind, even if you give them a cabinet full of additional evidence.”
3.19 This situation is made worse by the fact that asylum seekers are often not allowed to talk in the court: “We never feel we have the chance to tell our story from start to finish. It’s simply not the same to have a lawyer talking on your behalf. The immigration judge needs to hear you, but you are silenced.”
4. The use of Country of Origin Information and Operational Guidance Notes in determining the outcome of asylum applications.
4.1 Directly linked with questions of credibility is the issue of the unreliability of Country of Origin Information, particularly when taken from the internet. We feel that this is often poorly researched or biased. For example, on the 10th-11th April 2000 there was a student demonstration in Gambia, where news reports claimed 14 people died. However, this was based only on what happened in the capital, and 19 people actually died. We feel that in relying on evidence from the internet, UKBA is failing to recognise that the media is controlled by the government.
4.2 Similarly, we feel that there are many events and conflicts that slip below the radar of international news, and are never fully recorded. For example, the many skirmishes at the Uganda and DRC border that are part of the wider conflict between cattle herders and farmers there. This is not an isolated example, but a wider trend reflected across rural Africa (eg between Senegal and Mauritania).
4.3 An Iranian member of the group quoted an example where the dates when a group of political prisoners were executed being reported wrongly on Wikipedia. They were speechless to discover that this was being used as the basis for making a judgement by UKBA.
4.4 We also feel that UKBA fails to recognise the many peculiarities and characteristics of different faith groups, which can be a root cause of persecution: “You may all be Muslim, but there are still differences with how you exercise your faith. If your faith isn’t on google, they don’t believe it’s real.”
4.5 The narrow definition of asylum, coupled with a poor level of evidence contained in Country of Origin Information guidance, means that certain forms of gender based persecution are overlooked. For example, in Gambia some young men flee their communities as they are being forced to marry a wife ‘inherited’ from a deceased elder brother, father, or uncle.
5. Whether the system of support to asylum applicants (including section 4 support) is sufficient and effective and possible improvements.
5.1 Support rates for asylum seekers, particularly individuals are not enough to live on. Having no right to work leaves asylum seekers utterly dependent on the meagre support from UKBA, often for many years, and ultimately de-skills us and prevents us from contributing to society. Having limited access to ESOL and other learning opportunities leaves some of us unable to communicate fully, and, if we are granted asylum, unable to integrate.
5.2 The cost of travel in the UK is phenomenal, but we must travel to appointments with our solicitor, sometimes twice a week in the lead up to going to court. In Liverpool, a daily bus ticket is £4, and you only have £5 a day to live on a day. When we travel to appointments for UKBA it can take up to two weeks for our travel tickets to be reimbursed. If someone you are ill and need a special diet, £5 per day not enough.
5.3 On top of this, the way that UKBA administers support and allocates housing makes no sense. Different members of one family were dispersed to different regions: the husband to Liverpool, and wife and child to Leeds. Travel between these cities cost £34 and they were forced to wait 21 days before they could move in together. There were also delays caused by miscommunication between the support agency, the Case-owner and NASS, which left the husband with no support for 50 days. He was forced to borrow money and has not been allowed to claim anything back from UKBA for this missed support. In addition, because they were forced to register their child at several schools, the family also had to spend £70 each time on a school uniform and sports clothes.
Section 4
5.4 The challenges of living on Section 4 support include having no cash available and very little choice about where support can be spent. The inability to pay for phone credit means it’s difficult to keep in touch with your solicitor, and being unable to pay for travel prevents you from attending important appointments. Cashiers are often not familiar with the Azure card and often ask for photo I.D. forcing people to show their Home Office identity documents. This, in turn, can expose an asylum seeker to hostility and conflict, and make them feel a sense of shame and disgrace. This is made worse by language barriers.
5.5 We have evidence that Section 4 breaks up families. An example of this is a family where one partner has been granted leave to remain, but the other partner, who is HIV positive, hasn’t. The financial pressure to support the whole family remain was too great, and the HIV positive partner needed access to support in order to be able to afford healthy food. This forced them to apply for Section 4 support. However, current policy dictates that this cannot be accessed without the applicant moving to separate accommodation. We feel this policy should be changed and it would make better financial sense to support that person in the family home, whereas at the moment a lot of money is wasted in rent and utilities at properties rented from private landlords.
5.6 Having no permission to work forces people to rely on support from the Home Office and prevents them from contributing to society. Having little or no support can force you into breaking the rules by working illegally or push you into criminality. We feel the main solution is to offer asylum seekers the opportunity to work and contribute to society and the community if a decision has not been made swiftly on their case, and we urge the Select Committee to back the ‘Let them Work’ campaign. Developing a scheme similar to student placements would allow asylum seekers to contribute, pay their way and develop the skills and language to integrate in a new country.
5.7 Those who have been awaiting a decision from UKBA for a long time (ie ‘Legacy cases’) can in some circumstances apply for a Work Permit. However, the employment opportunities you can access are very restricted (categorised as ‘Work Restricted—SOL’). These include recognised areas where workers are in ‘short supply’ and posts are generally restricted to degree level qualification. This therefore does not amount to having a work permit for many asylum seekers and forces people to remain dependent on NASS support when they could be contributing and paying tax.
5.8 Finally, those who are granted status have only 28 days to leave their NASS supported accommodation and transfer to Job Seeker’s Allowance, leaving them at risk of destitution and without access to support. There is no recognition that people who are new to the country, or not speakers of English, struggle to perform job searches, and there is too little support available.
Liverpool Asylum and Refugee Association
April 2013