Thousands of failed asylum seekers in the UK are expected to face shorter waits for the outcomes of their appeals as the government increased the number of days judges can operate.
Ministers say the increased capacity will speed up the deportation of those who have no right to remain.
According to the government, there are currently 25,000 cases in the system waiting to be heard, including those who arrived in small boats across the English Channel and those claiming that being forced to leave the UK would breach their human rights.
The government said it’s investing £5 million ($6 million) to allow more hearings, meaning the immigration and asylum tribunals can hear up to 9,000 more cases by the end of March 2023, almost doubling the current rate.
The new investment means “decisions can be made more quickly, helping us tackle the backlog, ensure justice is served, and remove those who are not eligible,” Deputy Prime Minister, Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary Dominic Raab said in a joint statement with the Home Office.
Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick said the additional capacity is “hugely welcomed” and an “important part of the government’s effort to tackle illegal immigration.
“Faster decisions will enable us to speed up the removal of those with no right to be here, strengthen deterrence against those seeking to abuse our system, and focus our efforts on those in genuine need,” he said.
One Backlog After Another
The delays in the judicial system are not the only bottle neck in the UK’s immigration and asylum system.Peter Walsh, senior researcher at the Migration Observatory, University of Oxford, who gave evidence to MPs on the Home Affairs Committee on Wednesday, said the average waiting time for an initial asylum decision from the Home Official was 16.7 months in 2021.
Commenting on the reasons for the delay in asylum outcomes, Walsh said “plausible explanations” include administrative issues in the Home Office such as inadequate training, low morale, high staff turnover, and the abolishment of an internal target of processing most claims within six months in 2019.
One other plausible reason is that a previous fast-track scheme that enabled deportation decisions to “within weeks rather than months” was ruled unlawful in 2015, he added.
A small percentage of asylum seekers would be referred to under the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) as victims of modern slavery.
Giving evidence to the same committee, former Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner Dame Sara Thornton said officials have been encouraged to get better at identifying potential victims. She also said those referred under the NRM were more likely to face long delays as they wait “in one backlog, and then in another backlog.”
Albanians
The one-off Home Affairs Committee hearing was focused on the Albanians, who increasingly filled the small boats across the English Channel, which used to be mostly made up of Iranians and Iraqis.According to the Home Office, a total of 815 Albanian nationals arrived in small boats in the whole of 2021. Between May and September this year, 11,102 Albanians arrived by the same method, representing 42 percent of all small-boat arrivals in these months.
In October, Dan O’Mahoney, the Home Office’s clandestine threat commander, said many Albanian illegal immigrants were “gaming the system” by using the NRM.
Questioned by the Home Affairs Committee on Wednesday, Qirjako Qirko, the Albanian ambassador to the UK, said he does not have any figures regarding the situation.
Qirko said some of the “Albanians” who entered the UK illegally may be ethnic Albanians from neighbouring Montenegro, Kosovo, or North Macedonia. He also claimed British authorities couldn’t share the information with Albania under a bilateral agreement because these people “pretend to be victims of modern slavery.”
Andi Hoxhaj, a Lecturer in Law at the University College London with Albanian background, told the committee that his research showed most of those who left Albania left for reasons including economic opportunities, well being, access to the judiciary, or joining families.
He said one-third of Albanians now live below the poverty line, compared to 21 percent before the 2019 earthquake and the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the unemployment rate among people aged between 18 and 34 is around 60 percent.
However, there are also cases in which people are fleeing domestic violence or criminal gangs, the committee heard.
Almost a third of homicides in Albania “were of women by their partners. In the majority of those cases, they had a warrant against their husbands. We could see that there was a systematic failure of the Albanian institutions to prevent the attack and killing of these women,” Hoxhaj said.
Esme Madill, Solicitor at Migrant and Refugee Children’s Legal Unit at Islington Law Centre, who works with Albanian minors, said in some cases impoverished children were trafficked by gangs to pay back loans after their families, sometimes unknowingly, borrowed money to pay for things like medical care; while in some other cases, young people left the country for economic reasons before ending up in debt bondage, and the debt was sold on to criminal gangs which trafficked them.
Thornton and Madill also said victims are not always forthcoming about their experiences.
“Some girls who have been in brothels will never be able to say what they went through. For some boys who have been kept for seven, eight, or nine months locked in cannabis houses, I will get scarring reports to evidence the scars on their bodies, but they will never tell me all of what they have been through,” Madill said.
Thornton said modern slavery victims sometimes hide the experience because “they are in such fear of their traffickers that they would rather do a short sentence. Then, when they are going to be deported, they seek advice, and actually the evidence is there that they are victims of modern slavery.”
