« one execution, many explanations | Main | song for the self-immolators »

July 17, 2013

Comments

ajay

With a well founded fear of persecution, I would imagine he'd have been granted asylum. Why wouldn't he? This is the kind of case my mate the asylum lawyer dreams of getting.

Dan Hardie

Along with a lot of others, including Jamie and many of the regulars here, I spent over a year of my life trying to gain asylum rights for Iraqis who not only had a very well founded fear of persecution, in the shape of death threats from militias who had actually killed rather large numbers of people, but who had received those death threats because they had worked for the British military and diplomats.

The response of the Blair Government (pre the UK campaign, but very much post the first reports of employees being murdered, and the first pleas for asylum by the Iraqis) was to do precisely nothing.

Only slightly better was the response of the Brown Government was to do nothing for several months, set up a review body in the face of media and public pressure, after some time announce a limited asylum scheme hedged about with as many limiting conditions as they could think of, and then to implement it in the slowest, most pettifogging way imaginable, while rather a large number of Iraqi employees of the British were hiding from death squads.

None of this should be news to anyone who was reading Jamie's blog in 2007 and 2008, as he was one of the very best writers on the subject, and in fact it was one of his blogposts that started the whole damn campaign.

My faith in the British Government's determination to do the right thing for those in fear of their lives is consequently a little limited.

ajay

Quite a large number of Chinese refugees got granted asylum after 1989, IIRC - in the UK and elsewhere (Australia particularly comes to mind). Unfortunately the first British one that comes up on Google is this chap

http://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/court-crime/wang_yam_who_murdered_allan_chappelow_appeals_life_sentence_at_european_court_1_1794378

but I'm fairly confident that there were plenty others who didn't murder people.

Overall, about 20-40% of refugee-status applications are successful (asylum, leave to remain etc) on first attempt. And being a high-profile refugee, if one can use that phrase, from something like 4 June is great for your chances of a successful decision.

The comments to this entry are closed.

friends blogs

blobs

Blog powered by Typepad

my former home