Legal Action for Women
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Refugee Week (16-22 June) is “Celebrating Sanctuary”, but for thousands of women, children and men claiming asylum from rape and other torture and persecution, life in Britain can be yet another torture.

In the past decade, successive laws and policies have systematically denied those of us seeking asylum the most basic human rights.  In I999 the government took away benefits and housing.  It introduced a separate – but of course not equal – “support” system.  For the first time these services depended on NGOs to administer, taking them out of the welfare state.  Thus the government privatised state services, passing them to the voluntary sector.

This privatisation allows the government to shed its accountability; while the advocacy sector now depends on government funding, and is thus accountable to the government.  But who is accountable to asylum seekers?  Who defends our legal and human rights?

The government pays millions to the Refugee Council (RC) in England, Scotland and Wales, and to Migrant Helpline, Refugee Action and the Refugee Arrivals Project to administer housing, “support”, forced dispersal outside of London on behalf of the Home Office’s National Asylum Support Service (NASS).

The RC, which describes itself as “the largest refugee assisting agency in the UK . . . and the most influential”, gets over £60 million annually from the Home Office.  Last month, the RC invited other Refugee Community Organisations (RCOs) to bid for contracts working for NASS, thus extending privatisation.

Founded to defend the rights of some of the most traumatised and vulnerable of our people, many NGOs are increasingly embedded with the Home Office.  This embedding has brought a sharp increase in destitution and homelessness to those individuals and families claiming asylum.  While individuals are often told by NGOs that “nothing can be done” to help them, the same NGOs apply for increased funding to meet a growing demand for services.

In order to prepare the groundwork for these changes and rein in NGOs, the government launched a witch-hunt – asylum seekers were accused of being “bogus”, their children of “swamping schools”.  Teachers and parents protested that local children should not be denied the great contribution made by asylum children; and that the asylum kids should not be denied the education of being with local kids.  Their protest won the vote in the House of Lords, but this was ignored in the Commons: child detention and segregated “education” were forced through and children have been pulled out of schools.

Disinformation on asylum hides the responsibility of the West, and especially of the US and UK, for “friendly” dictatorships, the arms trade and their wars, imposing poverty, ecological devastation and repression.  This is what forces millions of people in the global south to flee our homes.  The UN estimates that 80% of refugees and displaced people are women and children (of whom 80% have suffered rape and other sexual violence).

In the last three months alone, over 100 women asylum seekers, some with infants, from Eritrea, Ethiopia and other African countries have applied for urgent help to Black Women’s Rape Action Project and Women Against Rape’s Asylum from Rape Project at our Women’s Centre, describing the torture and indignity they were put through in the UK:

·        Detention for months, including of mothers and children, which has caused many to attempt suicide.

·        Forced dispersal, even for people who have lived somewhere for years, have children settled in school, need urgent medical help, have an imminent appeal hearing, and whose only friends and support networks are there.  The NGOs paid to administer dispersal repeatedly tell women that they must leave or lose all support.  When asylum seekers refuse to leave, it is the NGOs running their accommodation which throw them on the street.  They do not advise them on their legal rights they need in order to challenge unfair dispersals – as many women and families helped at our Centre have done successfully.

·        Run-down, dirty, unsafe and sub-standard housing.  Many describe hostels like “prisons” where rape and other sexual violence go on.  Such housing is paid for by NASS but administered by NGOs like the Refugee Council.  Meanwhile, private and local authority landlords pocket exorbitant rents, and asylum seekers are accused of taking scarce housing resources.

·        Forced to queue for hours outside the Refugee Council in Brixton.  Every day hundreds of people, including heavily pregnant women and mothers with young children, have to queue at the One-Stop Shop from as early as 4 or 5am (one woman was told to come at 2am!) in all weathers, just to get into the building; even then many are told to come back for more queuing or sent away after being told that nothing can be done for them, and are left to sleep rough or told to go to the police for accommodation!

Many community groups, trade unions, church organisations and prominent people opposed the hated voucher system, and it was defeated.  The present brutality of the asylum system can also be overturned if NGOs actively defend the rights of those of us who are refugees, rather than implement government policy against us all.

Legal Action for Women

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