Update on current destitution in Glasgow.

On Wednesday we asked for help to find bedspaces for two destitute clients; Rui and Ndenga. A volunteer has very kindly agreed to host Rui in her home for two weeks, by which time we expect government support to be provided. Both Rui and PAiH are extremely grateful. You can read about Rui in today’s (Friday’s) Independent newspaper  http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article2405114.ece 

Sadly we have been unable to secure accommodation for Ndenga.  Despite running very low on money we are currently paying for him to stay in a hostel in
Glasgow. Information about Ndenga is at http://paihnews.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/urgent-appeal-on-behalf-of-destitute-asylum-seekers/ 

Unfortunately, today we have received another young woman Xei, referred from the Scottish Refugee Council, who is also pregnant and destitute. Her details are below. 

Xei is 20 and from
China. She is more than 6 months pregnant, and in the process of making a Section 4 application to the Home Office for ‘hard case’ support. This is very basic accommodation with vouchers that can be spent on food only. Xei arrived in
Glasgow in April to stay with friends. She has been asked to leave as friends are unable to help her any more. 

Xei has been without any support for more than a year after her asylum application was refused. She told us that she never got proper advice from her solicitor about her appeal rights and entitlement. While her Section 4 application is processed which are currently taking two weeks or more, she desperately needs a spare room or bedspace for this time. Xei speaks basic English, and is very worried about her situation and the baby’s future. 

Do you have a spare room or space?If you think you or someone you know has a spare room here in Glasgow and are willing to accommodate any of our clients for this interim period then please contact: Positive Action in Housing on 0141 353 2220 or e-mail david@paih.org urgently. 

Give a DonationThe Hardship Fund supports people in this position by giving small amounts of cash for food and basic essentials. In emergencies we can pay for short term accommodation. We spend upto £1000 per month supporting destitute asylum seekers. We desperately need donations as this work is not funded by any other means. 

You can make an online donation by clicking here. Or send a donation by cheque, made out to Positive Action in Housing and marked Hardship Fund on the back, to: 

Destitution Appeal
Positive Action in Housing

98 West George Street

Glasgow G2 1PJ 

Thank you for your support. 

Positive Action in Housing and our clients are sorry that we have to continue to ask for your help in this way. The Government could end all destitution instantly if it chose to do so. We are trying our best to persuade them to do this, both through working with local communities via www.destitution.net and through lobbying parliament directly by contributing to reports such as the one released today:  http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt200607/jtselect/jtrights/81 

Positive Action in Housing appeals for accommodation for destitute clients in good faith. We realise that accepting someone into your home is not without risk. To minimise this risk we disclose all information we posses about the client to volunteers. We are available to help resolve any concerns. We have never had any difficulties with clients staying with volunteers in this way but ultimate cannot take responsibility for any problems that may arise. 

 

MPs condemn asylum system as ‘inhumane’

Thousands of people fleeing persecution in their own countries end up victims of the UK’s “degrading and inhumane” asylum system, says a committee of MPs.

In assessing the Government’s 10-year asylum policy, the Joint Committee on Human Rights concludes that no “human being should have to suffer such appalling treatment”.

The MPs also have concerns about the greater use of detention against vulnerable people such as children, pregnant women and those with serious health problems.

Evidence before the committee included examples of a dying refugee being deported to a country where he had no palliative care and pregnant women being denied access to proper care in Britain.

The asylum system, says the report, is “overly complex, poorly administered, and offers inadequate information and advice about the support to which people are entitled, in some cases denying any support whatsoever to people who are desperate and destitute”. The report concludes that the human rights of some of the most vulnerable members of society have been breached.

The committee chairman, Andrew Dismore MP, said: “Innocent children should never be detained – alternatives must be developed.The system of asylum- seeker support is a confusing mess, and the policy of enforced destitution must cease.”

Robina Qureshi, the director of Positive Action in Housing, which supports asylum-seekers in Glasgow, said that the report confirmed what she saw on the streets every day.

She said: “The treatment these people receive amounts to them being tortured in a country which they have come to because they are fleeing persecution from their own.”

She added: “The system works on the basis that all applications are bogus and as a result is ruthless in its treatment of the most vulnerable people in society and inevitably leads to the decline in their physical and mental health.

“In the end, the weak ones are sent home and the strong simply join the underclass of Britain’s underclass, where they have to work in the underground economy. Many of these people end up sleeping in phoneboxes, night buses and car parks.”

Rui Juan, refugee, 25: ‘I’m scared and homesick’

Pregnant and fleeing persecution in China, Rui Juan has applied to the Home Office for “hard case” support. For the last year she has been without any financial support or assistance because her asylum application was refused. If she doesn’t get help she will be forced to live in the streets. For the past two weeks she has been helped by volunteers from the Positive Action in Housing charity, who have been able find her accommodation, but only in the short-term. She is now more than six months pregnant. Her situation is desperate and she needs a spare room or “bed space” for a few days until her new application is processed.

Ms Rui said through an interpreter: “I am very scared and very homesick. If Positive Action in Housing had not been here to help I would have to live in the street. I don’t know how else to live here or how to deal with this problem.”

She said: “I would like help to find a flat somewhere, I don’t care where. I don’t have any money to live. If I could work I would live and pay rent but if I have no work or no food I will be very sad.”

By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor
Published: 30 March 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article2405114.ece

URGENT APPEAL

“This appeal is regarding Uddhav Bhandari, the Nepalese asylum seeker who died recently after he poured petrol on himself and set himself on fire in the Immigration and appeal tribunal buildings in Glasgow earlier this month.

A post mortem has been carried out and Uddhav’s body can be released to his wife and family who are in Nepal. Uddhav’s family are extremely poor and do not have the funds to pay for the funeral and airline costs.

Positive Action in Housing are therefore launching an urgent appeal for donations to the Uddhav Bhandari Appeal to return his body to Nepal so that his family can grieve properly and organise his funeral arrangements according to Nepalese culture.

Without this appeal, there is every likelihood that Uddhav’s body could be left in a Glasgow morgue indefiintely, similar to an iraqi Kurd whose body was left in a Kent mortuary for three years before we organised donations from our supporters.

The total cost of the funeral and airline costs to return Uddhav Bhandari to Nepal is £3,997. If 100 people give £40.00 each this would achieve the total target. But please donate as much or as little as you can afford, every little bit will help. The sooner the money is raised the sooner Uddhav’s body can be sent back to Nepal. We will publish the money raised so far on our website at www.paih.org.
Thank you”
Robina Qureshi, Director

If you think you can help, please contact a member of PAiH staff by calling 0141 353 2220 or email jamie@paih.org

Appeal over asylum death

A FUNDRAISING appeal to fly home the body of an asylum seeker who died after setting himself alight at an immigration centre was launched yesterday.

The Scotsman revealed how Uddhav Bhandari, a Nepalese national living in Edinburgh, doused himself in petrol and torched himself before a hearing in Glasgow earlier this month. The 40-year-old died on 18 March.

Positive Action in Housing is trying to raise about £4,000 because his family in Nepal cannot afford the funeral and airline costs.

This article: http://news.scotsman.com/edinburgh.cfm?id=486152007

Last updated: 29-Mar-07 01:44 BST

Desperate measures

The alarming rate of asylum seeker suicides – and the lack of reporting it – is a shame on us all
Melanie McFadyean, Wednesday March 28, 2007
The Guardian

Uddhav Bhandari, a 40-year-old Nepalese asylum seeker, set himself alight in the Eagle Building, Bothwell Street, Glasgow – home to the asylum and immigration tribunal – on March 7. He died 11 days later in Glasgow royal infirmary.

He is the ninth asylum seeker to set himself alight in the UK since 1989, five of them since 2002. Why did these people choose this course of action? There is a tradition of public self-immolation as a form of political protest and sacrifice, people burning brightly in death shedding light on what the rest of us refused to look at when they were alive. Perhaps that was in their minds.

Ask people about those who burned themselves to death during the Vietnam war and most will remember hearing of them; but I have yet to meet anyone who knows anything about the nine deaths in the UK, despite their being well documented by Harmit Athwal of the Institute of Race Relations. Athwal’s catalogue, Driven to Desperate Measures, listing 221 asylum seekers who have died in the UK, 57 of them at their own hand, was published last year. It received very little press.

Bhandari, a father of two, fled Nepal six years ago. A former police officer, he exposed corruption in the Nepalese police and consequently was terrified of returning. He hoped to settle here and bring his family to the UK. Forbidden to work here, he was doing community work mending old bicycles. Bhandari was due to attend a second immigration appeal hearing the day he set himself on fire. This hearing could have resulted in a reconsideration of his case. But a judge had said earlier that he believed it safe for Bhandari to return as he would be protected by his “high profile”. One can only guess that Bhandari didn’t think so and that burning himself to death was preferable. Did he know about the eight before him? Probably not.

In October 1989, in Harmondsworth immigration removal centre, Siho Iyiguven, a Kurd, set himself on fire after being refused asylum. Two thousand people followed his funeral procession, intending to lay a black wreath at No 10, but police prevented them. Turan Pekoz, from Turkey, set himself alight in March 1993 at a Croydon immigration centre after hearing that he was not to be reunited with his family. Bayeh Arefanye, a young Ethiopian, set himself alight at a London petrol station in October 1995 because he feared deportation. Forsina Makoni, a 79-year-old Zimbabwean, set herself alight in Gillingham, Kent, in May 2002 after her claim was refused. She didn’t know that Zimbabwe is the one country to which refugees were not being returned by UK authorities. A nameless Iraqi asylum seeker set himself alight in 2004. His story was one of the very few to have made it into the media. It was reported in a local Haringey Turkish paper, Londra Gazete, which mentions that he “may have killed himself because he had been refused asylum”. Anonymous local residents claimed he had conned them out of thousands of pounds. There was nobody to defend his reputation. Nusrat Raza, a young Pakistani woman living in Bradford, was seen by a passer-by as a “great ball of fire coming down the stairs” of her house in June 2005. She had lost her asylum claim. Babak Ahadi, an Iranian asylum seeker, set himself alight in Bristol in July 2005. “I have no doubt in my mind that the failed asylum application had dire results and was the prime cause of Mr Ahadi’s death,” said the coroner at Ahadi’s inquest.

There are few details about the nine, but I was given a pile of official papers and two photos of Esrafil Shiri, a Shia Muslim from Tehran, by campaigners in Salford, where he had lived. Shiri arrived in the UK in the back of a truck in August 2001. “I am glad that I am under the British flag and I am free,” he told an immigration official. He had been a member of the Basij, enforcers of Islamic morality, but became disillusioned and refused to follow orders which meant harming innocent people. If he had returned to Iran he faced torture and probably death, not only for challenging the Basij but as a known bisexual. Rebwar Fatah, an expert advising British lawyers, said that despite social shifts in Iran, homosexuals could expect to be tortured before being put to death. After his appeal was turned down Shiri became destitute. In late August 2003 he took a can of inflammable liquid into the Refugee Action offices in Manchester and set himself alight.

It is the brutal effects of increasingly draconian immigration policy, pandering to the floating vote, which result in these deaths. And if it were British citizens burning to death we’d know about it. But rejected asylum seekers? Who cares? Shame on us all.

· Driven to Desperate Measures, Harmit Athwal, www.irr.org.uk.

· Melanie McFadyean lectures in journalism at City University.

melaniemcfadyean@yahoo.co.uk