I am indebted to Tim Fetherston for a reminder that in this conflictive, confrontational politics of today we need to retain a sense of moral duty of care for the vulnerable.
Fetherston is a volunteer medicolegal doctor from the Northeast if England with Freedom from Torture, a UK charity which, since its formation in 1985, has provided support for more than 50,000 victims of torture who have fled to the UK for asylum.
This support ,Fetherston tells us, “takes the form of psychological therapy, social assistance and advice, and support with asylum claims, particularly in the form of specialist medicolegal reports which document the evidence of torture, both physical and psychological. As volunteer doctors, we undertake to provide detailed medicolegal reports for the torture survivor’s legal representative which are used in support of the asylum claim. The reports detail the nature and location of scarring, give a reasoned professional opinion of how each scar was caused and include a psychological assessment.”
As Fetherston writes in a recent article published by the excellent international Catholic weekly The Tablet , a forty-odd year career in front-line hospital surgical practice – during which he has witnessed some terrible things – had not fully prepared him for some of the things he would hear and see in his work with Freedom from Torture.
“ In particular, the utterly gratuitous cruelty of the torture inflicted, the acts sometimes almost beyond imagination, and the profound mental health effects which I would encounter in clients, has taken me quite by surprise. Perhaps it shouldn’t have done, but it has.”
Those attempting to seek shelter and new lives in the UK have been displaced by the intolerance and repression in their own countries of origin, but also wars , some of which Britain and its allies have been involved in, and poverty, made worse by the environmental consequences of global warming that the richer nations have yet to adequately help counter.
Given the above I cannot but feel appalled by the tone and content of the UK government’s proposed new asylum law which , as the UNHCR’s representative to the UK, Vicky Tennant , suggests, is a breach of Britain’s international obligations, not least the Refugee Convention , and this in a country that has a “long standing humanitarian tradition.”
As for dealing with people trafficking, the problem cannot excuse a policy that ,by the current Home Secretary’s admission, has been framed in the expectation(presumably legal advice given by Whitehall’s own lawyers) that the proposed legislation is not compatible with the European Court of Human Rights and is widely expected to face legal challenges.
The admission appears to have an eye on placating hard-line Tory MP’s backbench Brexiteers , while the policy itself risks appealing to the worse kind of bigotry towards ‘outsiders’.
The UK government’s asylum policy is not only inhuman but also impractical. It is not a solution to tackling thousands who risk their lives at the hands of ruthless smugglers to reach a safer haven in British .
As Ms Tennant rightly points out, rather than draft a policy that risks violating human basic rights, the government should be focusing at home and abroad in ensuring that migration is tackled in a fairer and more efficient way, so that those entitled to asylum are integrated into our society not banished from it.
Recent Home Secretaries-Patel and Braverman-have in their tone and language tended to appeal to intolerance rather than compassion, raising fears of the country being overwhelmed by a foreign invasion. .
As Tim Fetherston puts it: ‘The very notion that a traumatised refugee in need would be turned away from the UK, and sent to a distant country such as Rwanda, is quite outrageous – it is a policy which is both cruel and inhuman.”
