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Refugees: Tightening the Screw 93
the Indian government does not condone such actions. As the authorities have given
assurances that all accusations of wrong doing would be investigated and action
taken against those responsible, the Secretary of State does not regard such persons
as agents of persecution.
But, says Asylum Aid, quite apart from the value or otherwise of assurances
from the Indian government (which, as Amnesty International has reported,
has notably failed to prosecute its agents who have engaged in torture and
other abuses against Sikhs in Punjab), a torturer is ipso facto an ‘agent of
persecution’, as per paragraph 65 of the UNHCR Handbook. A Burmese
refugee, who had said that he took part in pro-democracy demonstrations
at the Burmese embassy in London, was first accused of not having said so
earlier when he in fact had, and then accused of having demonstrated simply
in order to enhance his claim for asylum.
Four years later, as reported in Still No Reason At All, a refugee was told in
his refusal letter:
You state that the men drove you to a place one and a half hours away and told you
to run before they opened fire on you. The Secretary of State ... considers that if the
men had intended to kill you they would have done so straight away rather than give
you a chance to escape.
A Nigerian asylum seeker was told that, because he got the date of Ken Saro-
Wiwa’s sentencing wrong by one day, the secretary of state ‘is of the opinion
that these discrepancies must cast doubt on the credibility of your claim to
be a MOSOP leader’. A Chinese refugee was told that ‘the Chinese authorities
are taking positive steps towards eradicating [human rights abuses]’. And
so it goes on. Still No Reason At All comments:
The stories of asylum-seekers – the stories Asylum Aid hears daily – bear no relation
to the self-serving mendacity they are accused of in Home Office refusal letters. The
insult is all the greater when the recipients see that the reasons for refusal scarcely
address the substance of their claim, and often draw on some irrelevant detail to refute
the entire case. Their disillusionment is complete when they realise that the reasons
they receive are standard cut-and-paste paragraphs and not an assessment of the
merits of their individual claim.
Problems also arise frequently from poor reporting and interpretation. Initial
interviews usually take place without legal representation and are conducted
by an immigration official with minimal skills and knowledge of the situation
in the countries the refugees have fled from; interpreters frequently make
mistakes, and refugees later find it hard to convince officials that the mistakes
were the interpreter’s rather than their own. Interpreters sometimes make
the elementary mistake of translating ‘we’ as ‘they’, thus giving the
impression that the refugee was an observer rather than a participant in
political actions. In 1994 a refugee with a virtually incontrovertible case
travelled 70 miles to an appeal hearing in Birmingham, with several
supporters including two people in their eighties; the interpreter was so