Protecting
People Subject to Immigration Control From
Covid-19
COVID-19 has made it abundantly clear that the
divisive politics of austerity and the hostile
environment have left us all less safe and more
vulnerable. There can be no going back to
‘business as usual’ after the pandemic: no more
good migrant versus bad migrant, benefit
claimant versus tax payer.
Change needs to happen – not just because it
makes sense if we are to keep healthy, but
because it just makes sense.
The commodification of people based on income,
job, nationality or immigration status has been
exposed for the nonsense it always was. So,
while we applaud the rebranding of last month’s
“low skilled migrants” as this month’s
“essential key workers”, this needs to be
matched with a wider understanding that people’s
rights are not based on their perceived economic
or social value. People should not have to be
superheroes to be worthy of protection,
including protection from COVID-19.
While the pandemic has shown we are all in it
together, we are certainly not all experiencing
the impact of COVID-19 in the same way.
Inequalities and racism have not disappeared.
Protections offered to people subject to
immigration control have to date been piecemeal
and contradictory. At times it seems that public
health needs have played second fiddle to
politicking about immigration enforcement.
At a minimum we believe it is in all our best
interests that during the pandemic:
everyone should be able to access healthcare
everyone should have a roof over their head and
food to eat
everyone in the UK without permission should
have permission granted and be able to access
services
no one should lose their immigration status
no one should be trapped in immigration
detention or situations of domestic violence
no one should face the hostile environment
Read more: GMIAU, https://is.gd/w2CnYi
Record 50
Million People Internally Displaced In 2019
A total of 50.8 million people around the world
were recorded as internally displaced last year,
forced from their homes by conflict and
disaster. This is the highest number ever, and
10 million more than in 2018. Annual statistics
published by the Norwegian Refugee Council’s
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC)
calculated that by the end of 2019, 45.7 million
people were internally displaced – effectively
becoming refugees in their own country – as a
result of violence in 61 countries. An
additional 5.1 million people in 96 countries
had been displaced by disasters. Alexandra
Bilak, the IDMC director, said she had hoped
internal displacement would receive more global
attention this year, following the launch in
October of a UN high-level panel to address the
problem and find long-term solutions. The panel
held its first meeting in February.
The report, published on Tuesday, showed that
the majority of new cases of displacement last
year were in poorer countries. The highest
number were recorded in sub-Saharan Africa,
where escalating violence and deteriorating
security in the Sahel and ongoing conflict in
Somalia and South Sudan continued to drive
hundreds of thousands from their homes. Tropical
storms and monsoon rains in south and east Asia
and the Pacific had also displaced millions.
India, the Philippines, Bangladesh and China
each recorded at least 4 million displacements,
although the majority were the result of
evacuations by their governments. By the end of
last year, more than 130,000 people were still
unable to return home after the devastation of
cyclones Idai and Kenneth. Bilak warned that
next year’s displacement report was “going to be
extremely difficult” to compile as people
responsible for collecting data may struggle to
do so under current restrictions. “We could end
up with a black hole of data,” she said.
Read more: Liz Ford, Guardian, https://is.gd/aqBBPp
EDM
357: Healthcare Charges For Migrants
That this House notes that migrant communities,
who are disproportionately at risk of exclusion,
stigma and discrimination, are not currently
receiving the necessary safeguards;
further notes that the British Medical
Association, the Royal College of Physicians,
and Doctors of the World have called on the
Government to suspend the National Health
Service (Charges to Overseas Visitors)
Regulations 2015 and 2017 and all associated
immigration checks and data sharing;
believes that it is vital that a clear
message is sent to migrant communities that they
can seek care when they need it, that they are
included in society and have a part to play in
response to this crisis;
and therefore calls on the Government to suspend
all NHS charging for migrants, suspend all data
sharing between health services and the Home
Office;
implement a firewall to ensure that
patient data will not be shared with the Home
Office or other bodies for the purposes of
immigration enforcement;
and launch an information campaign to ensure
both NHS staff and the public are aware of these
changes and that it is safe for people to seek
care, particularly aimed at migrant communities
across the UK.
Signatures (17)
Parliament, Wednesday 22nd April, https://is.gd/onkXWJ
Put Your MP to Work – Ask Them to Sign EDM
357 To find your MP go
here: https://www.writetothem.com/
Explained:
The Infection That’s Silently Killing
Coronavirus Patients
I have been practising emergency medicine for
30 years. In 1994 I invented an imaging system
for teaching intubation, the procedure of
inserting breathing tubes. This led me to
perform research into this procedure, and
subsequently teach airway procedure courses to
physicians worldwide for the last two decades.
So at the end of March, as a crush of Covid-19
patients began overwhelming hospitals in New
York City, I volunteered to spend 10 days at
Bellevue, helping at the hospital where I
trained. Over those days, I realized that we
are not detecting the deadly pneumonia the
virus causes early enough and that we could be
doing more to keep patients off ventilators —
and alive.
On the long drive to New York from my home in
New Hampshire, I called my friend Nick Caputo,
an emergency physician in the Bronx, who was
already in the thick of it. I wanted to know
what I was facing, how to stay safe and about
his insights into airway management with this
disease. “Rich,” he said, “it’s like nothing
I’ve ever seen before.”
He was right. Pneumonia caused by the
coronavirus has had a stunning impact on the
city’s hospital system. Normally an E.R. has a
mix of patients with conditions ranging from
the serious, such as heart attacks, strokes
and traumatic injuries, to the
nonlife-threatening, such as minor
lacerations, intoxication, orthopaedic
injuries and migraine headaches.
During my recent time at Bellevue, though,
almost all the E.R. patients had Covid
pneumonia. Within the first hour of my first
shift, I inserted breathing tubes into two
patients.
Even patients without respiratory complaints
had Covid pneumonia. The patient stabbed in
the shoulder, whom we X-rayed because we
worried he had a collapsed lung, actually had
Covid pneumonia. In patients on whom we did CT
scans because they were injured in falls, we
coincidentally found Covid pneumonia. Elderly
patients who had passed out for unknown
reasons and a number of diabetic patients were
found to have it.
And here is what really surprised us: These
patients did not report any sensation of
breathing problems, even though their chest
X-rays showed diffuse pneumonia and their
oxygen was below normal. How could this be?
We are just beginning to recognize that Covid
pneumonia initially causes a form of oxygen
deprivation we call “silent hypoxia” —
“silent” because of its insidious,
hard-to-detect nature.
Read more: Richard Levitan, New York
Times, https://is.gd/cHNasO
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Windrush
Backlog Reaches 3,720 Cases
Lawyers and campaigners have expressed
concern about a large backlog of unresolved
Windrush cases, revealed in fresh Home Office
figures, two years after Amber Rudd resigned as
home secretary amid the emerging scandal. More
than 12,000 people who were wrongly classified
by the Home Office as illegal immigrants have
now been given citizenship or some other form of
documentation proving that they have – and
always had – the right to live in the UK.
But there are 3,720 outstanding cases with the
Windrush taskforce, the body set up to consider
applications from people who believe they were
wrongly categorised as immigration offenders.
Those decisions triggered often catastrophic
problems for the individuals’ access to
employment, healthcare, housing and pensions. In
extreme cases some of those affected were
detained and deported. The home secretary, Priti
Patel, revealed that 1,111 of these cases have
yet to be considered, while the others are still
under review. More than 150 people have been
waiting for longer than six months, and 35
people have spent over a year waiting for a
response.
Read more: Amelia Gentleman, Guardian,
https://is.gd/tIbxyC
AM (Zimbabwe) Any Home Office Attempt to
Remove AM Would Breach Article 3
AM was born in 1987 and is a national of
Zimbabwe. He arrived in the UK in 2000 to join
his mother, and he was granted indefinite leave
to remain in 2004. In 2006, AM was convicted of
a number of criminal offences and sentenced to a
total of 12 months’ imprisonment. In 2009, AM
was convicted of offences relating to possession
of a firearm and supply of heroin, and he was
sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment. The
Secretary of State seeks to deport AM. However,
AM is HIV positive. He was placed on the
anti-retroviral medication, Eviplera, after
having first tried another medication which
produced significant side-effects. If AM is
deported to Zimbabwe, a range of anti-retroviral
medications would be available, but not
Eviplera.
At a hearing before the First-tier
Tribunal, counsel then appearing for AM relied
on AM’s medical condition and the limits on
treatment available to him, in addition to the
impact of his deportation on his wife and child,
to advance a claim based on Article 8 of the
European Convention on Human Rights. The
First-tier Tribunal dismissed the claim. AM
appealed, and the appeal was dismissed by the
Upper Tribunal. In the Court of Appeal, AM based
his appeal on Article 3, rather than Article 8,
of the European Convention on Human Rights. The
Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal. AM
appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court was asked to consider whether
to return AM to Zimbabwe would violate his right
under Article 3 of the European Convention on
Human Rights not to be subjected to inhuman
treatment by reason of his medical condition, in
light of the decision of the European Court of
Human Rights in Paposhvili v Belgium [2017] Imm
AR 867.
The Supreme Court unanimously allowed the
appeal.
EDM 371:
International Human Rights Violations During
The Coronavirus Pandemic
That this House is gravely concerned by serious
human rights violations occurring across the
world as a result of the coronavirus pandemic;
notes that restrictions on human rights in
response to a national public health emergency
must be lawful, proportionate, necessary,
subject to review, and limited in duration, and
that prohibitions against arbitrary deprivation
of life, torture and other ill-treatment are
absolute;
is alarmed at reports of the well-being of
vulnerable populations in many countries, such
as prisoners, slum-dwellers, the homeless,
refugees and migrants, not being properly
protected;
is also alarmed at reports of governments
adopting disproportionate measures which could
be used inter alia to suppress freedom of
expression and media freedom, such as in
Hungary, Cambodia and Thailand, as well as of
police using excessive force to enforce
restrictions, such as in Nigeria, Kenya and
South Africa;
urges all governments to ensure any
curtailment of fundamental freedoms during this
emergency are entirely legitimate;
and calls on the Government to use its global
influence to help curb unlawful human rights
infringements during the pandemic and to assist
less developed countries in better protecting
vulnerable communities and channelling further
resources into their healthcare and welfare
systems.
House of Commons, Tabled 22 April 2020, https://is.gd/DFVLdm
Put Your MP to Work – Ask Them to Sign EDM
371 To find your MP go
here: https://www.writetothem.com/
What
is the Home Office Not Telling Us?
How can the Home Office be prevented from
withholding important information in
immigration appeals?
In Nimo (appeals: duty of disclosure) [2020]
UKUT 00088 (IAC) the Upper Tribunal –
consisting of Lane J, President, and Mr
Ockelton, Vice-President – has decided to
revisit the question of the Home Office’s duty
to disclose material potentially helpful to an
appellant during the course of an appeal. In
doing so, the Tribunal has made a point of
overruling a decision of the previous
President, Miah (interviewer’s comments;
disclosure; fairness) [2014] UKUT 515,
apparently on the grounds that it was made
without reference to earlier authority and was
therefore per incuriam.
Nimo concerns an alleged marriage of
convenience in an EEA case. The refusal
was based, as so often in such cases, largely
on discrepancies between answers given by the
appellant at a Home Office interview and those
given by his wife, which were said to show
that they were not genuinely married. The
issue arising was whether the Home Office was
required to disclose, as a matter of course,
the comments of the interviewing officer,
contained in a form called ICD.4605. The
appellant’s hope, it seems, was that those
comments might have placed the discrepancies
in a better light.
The Tribunal cites CM (EM country guidance;
disclosure) Zimbabwe CG [2013] UKUT 00059
(IAC), and the references in it to cases such
as R v SSHD ex p Kerrouche [1997] Imm AR
610 and R (Cindo) v IAT [2002] EWHC 246 Admin.
From those it concludes, according to the
headnote, that ‘the Secretary of State’s duty
of disclosure is not knowingly to
mislead’. On that basis, it disapproves
the decision of the previous President in
Miah, to the effect that (in the words of the
headnote to Nimo) ‘in every appeal involving
an alleged marriage of convenience, the
interviewer’s comments in the Secretary of
State’s form ICD.4605 must be disclosed to the
appellant and the Tribunal’.
There is no doubt that Miah, like many
Tribunal decisions of its era, relies more on
vigorous reasoning from first principles
(general case law on fairness) than on any
obvious familiarity with previous judgments on
the very point at issue: CM Zimbabwe,
Kerrouche and Cindo are not mentioned, for
instance.
Read more: Alasdair Mackenzie, Doughty Street
Chambers
Digital
Divide 'Isolates and Endangers' Millions
of UK's Poorest
Lockdown is creating a stark digital divide in
the UK, with 1.9 million households with no
access to the internet and tens of millions
more reliant on pay-as-you-go services to make
phone calls or access healthcare, education
and benefits online. Frontline community
groups and charities are warning that the
digital exclusion of some of the UK’s poorest
and most vulnerable households and communities
is having a devastating effect across the
country. The scale of the problem is
staggering,” says Helen Milner, the chief
executive of the Good Things Foundation, a
charity that tackles digital exclusion in the
UK. “Pay-as-you-go customers without the means
to buy data are finding themselves shut in
their homes, facing social isolation with no
means of communicating with the outside
world.” While the UK’s major internet
providers have agreed to remove data caps on
fixed-line broadband during the coronavirus
pandemic, this does not apply to the estimated
1.9 million households with no internet data
or the 25.9 million pay-as-you-go customers,
who make up over a quarter of all mobile phone
subscriptions in the UK. Vulnerable groups
such as elderly people, asylum seekers and
refugees and households living in poverty are
hit hardest by more expensive pay-as-you-go
tariffs because they cannot afford wifi at
home or fixed-term contracts.
Read more: Annie Kelly, Guardian, https://is.gd/wE2mXf
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