REFUGEE WEEK – 19th-25th June, 2006.
Where is God in all this? A good question for Christians to ponder, as Refugee Week comes round again, and one of the matters considered at a conference “Place of Danger – Place of Safety” on the 20th May, organised by CRN (Churches’ Refugee network).
This question was addressed by Nicholas Sagovsky, Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey. He regarded it as a central question in theology. Things that make us most human are loving, caring, compassionate relationships. It is striking that all the main religions put compassion at the centre. It is a baseline of what it means to be human. He referred to the parable of the Good Samaritan. This starts with the lawyer’s question “Who is my neighbour?” How far does loving my neighbour go? Unlike the Priest and the Levite, the Samaritan, a second class citizen, had nothing to lose, so he was free to act. In giving the answer to Jesus’s question, the one who had compassion, the lawyer had to rethink his relationship with the law. There follows the command “Go and do likewise”. That is where God is – a place where there is compassion. And Nicholas added hope. God suffers with humanity through Jesus. What good is that without hope? So for Christians comes the Resurrection. In the light of the new life Good Friday is seen in a different way, and so there is hope. In the deepest suffering there can be hope, and in hope is God. Where is God in all this? Where there is compassion and hope.
Detention. Topics considered earlier showed how much there is need of compassion and hope. On one of these, detention, we were addressed by Anne Owers, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons. You have committed no crime. There has been no Court order. Yet as an asylum seeker you can be, and many, including children, are detained. There is no certainty what will happen. You are away from the public eye. Inspections are necessary, because without them things can happen and conditions can get worse about which no one knows. Among asylum seekers inspections have found high levels of feeling unsafe. Sometimes because of the conditions, the lack of privacy, the attitude of staff, the fact of detention itself in the country to which they have fled because of treatment suffered or feared in their country of origin, the insecurity of not knowing what is happening, and the inability to get competent legal advice and talk to someone about their case, there is now risk of self harm and suicide. Staff have language difficulties and are insufficiently trained to understand these vulnerabilities.
Added to this are practical difficulties or concerns: families and homes from which the asylum seekers have been taken; bad conditions in some short term holding centres (even to there being no proper sleeping accommodation); sexes not separated; medical conditions not known or cared for; insufficient child protection. It is all made worse by asylum seekers being shipped around the country – anything from 2 to 20 times. No proper documents accompany them and they are moved without notice. Finally, the decision to detain children takes no account of their welfare and there is no independent assessment of this.
Refugee Policy. Another year, another Act. The Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act, 2006, is the third in four years and the sixth since 1993. So the immigration system is in almost permanent revolution. One thing that Maeve Sherlock, Chief Executive of the Refugee Council, would ask the Government is to stop making new laws.
The system’s only job is, or should be, to ask whether the asylum seeker is or is not a person who qualifies for refugee status. But that is not the problem the reforms address. The aim is to get fewer people entering the UK, firstly by making it more difficult to enter. People from 108 countries now need a visa, including all the most common countries for refugees. But you can’t get a visa if your reason for coming is to claim asylum. So the only way is to pay a people smuggler. That is illegal entry, but the 1951 Refugee Convention says that it is not an offence to enter illegally to claim asylum. In addition border controls are pushed back by methods designed to stop people before they reach the UK border. The second way is to try to encourage asylum seekers not to choose the UK by making the system tougher and by facing people with the risk of destitution.
In 2002, the peak year, there were 84,000 applications for asylum. In 2005 this number had fallen to 26,000. The statistics paint a picture where most applications are refused at first instance. The success rate on appeal is about 20%, quite a high level. Large numbers of asylum seekers are detained. Yet the top ten countries from which they come have records of persecution.
Where is God in all this?
John Willmer
Refugge Week
John Willmer