Two convicted for racial assault on asylum seeker

TWO St Budeaux men asked an Eritrean asylum seeker for money and attacked him when he didn’t pay up, a court heard.

The 27-year-old victim and a friend had collected a female friend from the bus station and were walking home through Mayflower Street at around 11pm on Sunday, February 7.

They were confronted by Michael Mooney, who asked the man for money, racially insulting him and punching him in the face when he didn’t pay.

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Asylum seeker takes his own life after losing legal aid

After losing the legal aid necessary to continue his application Iraqi Kurdish asylum seeker Osman Rasul jumped of the seventh floor of a block of flats in Nottingham.

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RMJ clients take Justice and Home Secretaries to court

Asylum seeker clients of Refugee Migrant Justice (RMJ), who this week failed to secure the funding required to avoid administration, are to take the Justice and Home Secretaries to the High Court for a judicial review.

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Zimbabwean facing deportation granted judicial review

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New fresh claims case

Free Movement – The Court of Appeal has re-visited the proper approach to deciding whether fresh asylum claims meet the rule 353 test. The case is R (on the application of YH) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2010] EWCA Civ 116 and it effectively supersedes WM (DRC) and interprets the Supreme Court decision in BA (Nigeria). In fact none of it comes as a surprise, though, and it adds little if anything new.

Firstly, giving the leading judgment, Lord Justice Carnwath holds that there is no practical difference between the rule 353 test for a fresh claim and the clearly unfounded test at section 94 of the 2002 Act. Their Lordships in the Supreme Court expended a lot of intellectual energy saying that the tests were different, but there we go. It’s all counting angels.

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Yarl’s Wood Hunger Strikers Speak

The Guardian – Twenty women at Yarl’s Wood ­detention centre in Bedford have been on hunger strike for two and a half weeks in protest at their treatment by the immigration ­authorities. Here, one of them, Denise McNeil, tells her story:

 I have been on hunger strike for more than a fortnight. I feel weak and get terrible headaches. A ­doctor says I should eat, but I am still refusing food. I can’t sleep because I am woken every hour of the night when the light goes on and somebody here checks on me.

The women have been through terrible experiences – some are survivors of rape and torture – but we are treated like criminals. When we staged a protest two weeks ago, we were locked in a corridor, with no water or toilet facilities. After two hours, some women felt sick. One had an asthma attack and we begged the officers to let her out, but they refused. Since then, I have been detained in isolation.

I came to the UK from Jamaica in April 2000. My brother had been murdered by a gang, and my sister was going to be a witness at the trial – then she was killed too. I realised I would be murdered if I stayed, so I came to Britain. My son, then seven, joined me a few months later.

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Damning judgment on removal of children

Free Movement – Mr Justice Collins has given a scathing judgment in a grant of permission to a judicial review challenge to the practice of the Home Office’s Third Country Unit (TCU) in detaining and removing children to supposedly safe third countries such as Greece and Italy. The case was heard yesterday and a transcript was ordered but is not available at the time of writing.

For more on third country cases generally see this recent post. The arguments on return of children to a third country were obviously considered by Collins J to be different to those relating to adults.

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Iraq refuses to accept deportees from UK

The Guardian – Home Office attempts to forcibly deport thousands of failed Iraqi asylum seekers suffered a setback today when it emerged that Baghdad has objected to any “increase in returns”.

The official refusal surfaced in a high court test case , which ruled that an ethnic Kurd should be released after 21 months in immigration detention because there was no likelihood of his being sent back, even in the “medium term”.

The decision by Mr Justice Langstaff may relate only to a single individual – Soran Ahmed, 22, from Kirkuk – but the judgment has exposed the Iraqi government’s reluctance to receive deportees and the difficulty UK officials have persuading counterparts in Baghdad to cooperate.

An internal Whitehall document, read out to the court, detailed how the UK Border Agency is proposing to fly Iraqi officials into Britain so that they can understand and “buy-in” to the deportation process. It also suggested arranging a UK ministerial visit to Baghdad to stress “the importance of returns to Iraq“.

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Iranian Asylum Seeker on Hunger Strike

By Sarah Cosgrove

The Times – A DESPERATE refugee has been on hunger strike for nearly two weeks because she is terrified of being tortured and killed if she is forced to return to Iran.

Bita Ghaedi, of High Road, Whetstone, was refused asylum by the British Government and told she would be deported within a fortnight.

But the 34-year-old, who said she has endured two decades of beatings and mental torture at the hands of her family and her former lover, claims there is no doubt she will be hunted down and killed by her father, brother and uncle should she return.

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My decade: The asylum seeker

‘My mother is ill now, and I can’t go back to see her. I have been granted asylum, but I have to wait five years to get a passport’

By Viv Groskop

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