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Refugees: Tightening the Screw 91
in court for them unpaid. This happened to a Nigerian Ogoni, who had been
imprisoned and tortured three times in Nigeria but had lost his appeal in the
absence of legal representation and been removed as far as Belgium; at
Brussels airport he contacted a UN representative and was returned to
Britain; his visitor persuaded a good lawyer to represent him without
payment, and he won refugee status. The Refugee Legal Centre, inadequately
funded by the Home Office, and Asylum Aid, a charity funded by donations,
provide free representation at appeals for limited numbers of people. Partly
because they can choose the cases they take on, both exceeded the average
10 per cent success rate at appeals: the Refugee Legal Centre wins around
25 per cent of appeals; Asylum Aid won 100 per cent of its appeals in
1998/99 and around 88 per cent of them in 1997/98. A further element of
uncertainty is of course the severity or otherwise of the adjudicators
themselves; this is common to all judicial proceedings, but aggravated by the
low level of training and skills of many of the adjudicators.
Immigration officials appear to see their role, both in their initial decisions
and in their adversarial role at appeal hearings, as one of undermining the
cases and credibility of asylum seekers and catching them out in ‘inconsistencies’.
Their attempts to undermine credibility are sometimes ludicrous.
When the Ogoni refugee’s lawyer produced evidence of torture at his appeal,
the Home Office representative asked whether he had worked with agricultural
machinery, and when he said he had, attempted to argue that his
wounds could have been received in that way; even the adjudicator clearly
found this ridiculous. In 1995 Asylum Aid published a document entitled
Adding Insult to Injury: Experiences of Zairean Refugees in the UK, which states
that:
Many of the reasons given by the Home Office for refusing asylum to Zaireans defy
belief. For instance, it is regularly suggested by the Home Office that signs of torture
displayed by Zaireans could have been caused accidentally. This implies, strangely,
that dozens of Zaireans are opportunistically using accident scars as an excuse to claim
asylum. The Home Office appears to think that it is a coincidence that so many people’s
scars resemble those left by handcuffs, whips or electrodes. Zaireans who have escaped
from imprisonment are told they are lying about it because they could not possibly
have escaped by bribery (in one of the notoriously most corrupt countries in the
world!). In other cases they are informed that their escape, however fortuitous, means
they cannot any longer be of interest to the authorities. One Zairean was told his claim
to have been involved in student politics was not accepted because he had not
explained how he found time for his political activities at the same time as his studies
and in any case he had apparently failed to mention how he paid for his studies.
A refugee said at his initial examination that on one occasion he wore a Tshirt;
at his appeal hearing he described it differently; this was held to
undermine his credibility. Another refugee initially said that the cell he had
been locked up in had no window; at his appeal he said that it had only a
grid above the door; he was said to have lied. Asylum Aid carries a regular
feature in its Newsletter on the ‘unfair, unsubstantiated and sometimes plain