Robina Qureshi, Director of the non profit refugee and migrant homelessness charity Positive Action in Housing, said:
“The Home Secretary cannot go against the UN Refugee Convention and illegally arrest people who are exercising their basic human rights to seek sanctuary here. It is not illegal for people to arrive in the UK via small boats for the purpose of seeking asylum. If she wants to reduce the number of boats then she should do more to create safe routes to sanctuary rather than let people die trying.”
“The human rights of asylum seekers is not a “grand theory” to those who support refugees and asylum-seekers in the UK.
“We see the depths of poverty, depression despair that people are reduced to. We see the utter paralysing fear so that people are too terrified to show their faces or give their names, and do not dare speak up in complaint or even ask for the most basic of human rights. Turning your back on all of this, and turning asylum into an even worse torture test is indefensible.
“We don’t need lectures by the current Home Secretary about the human rights of refugees in this country, this topic is just another abstract, dog whistle vote winner. She is also confusing immigration and asylum with her comments on “free movement”
According to Refugee Action, 35,566 asylum applications were made in the UK in 2019 – down from a peak of 84,000 in 2002. At the same time, delays in processing UK asylum applications have increased significantly.
Four out of five applicants in the last three months of 2019 waited six months or more for their cases to be processed.
Ms Patel said the UK would make more “immediate returns” of people who arrived illegally “and break our rules, every single week”.
READ MORE: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54404554
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Read more: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54404554