More asylum seekers being returned to first European country of entry, often Italy, while visa approvals have fallen from 70% to 40% in four years

The UK is quietly ejecting Syrian refugees back to the EU countries they first arrived in, and is making it progressively harder for Syrians to enter the UK legally, lawyers say.

As the UN makes plans to try to funnel more Syrians from overwhelmed southern European countries to the richer north, official UK figures show more than 30 people were removed from the UK in a 12-month period to mid-2014; visa approvals, meanwhile, have fallen from about 70% in 2010 to less than 40% last year.

“I have many Syrian clients whom the secretary of state has tried, and is trying, to send … to other countries,” said Greg Ó Ceallaigh, a barrister at Garden Court chambers. He said the Home Office was determined to send Syrians back to apply for asylum in the European countries they had first arrived in, such as Italy and Bulgaria, under the EU rule known as the Dublin regulation.

“The worst case was an extremely vulnerable woman with a newborn child and serious mental health issues whom [they] tried repeatedly to send to Bulgaria at a time when it was well-known that the situation was very poor,” he added. “They fought tooth and nail on that case; they are still fighting others.”

A freedom of information request found that between January 2013 and the end of 2014, 50 Syrians were removed from the UK under Dublin rules, 18 of them to Italy.

It is not known how many Syrians have successfully resisted removal, but Ó Ceallaigh said he alone had stopped several Syrians from being removed since the war began.

Challenges from lawyers to Dublin removals have been made mainly on the grounds that reception and accommodation conditions in Greece, Italy and Bulgaria are so poor they constitute a breach of article 3 of the European convention on human rights, the right to freedom from inhuman and degrading treatment.

Returns to Greece have been suspended across most of Europe since 2011, when the European court of human rights ruled that conditions there amounted to a systemic breach of human rights.

In 2014 the UN high commissioner for refugees called for a total moratorium on returns to Bulgaria from the rest of Europe because of poor conditions there, although that request has now been lifted.

Another test case challenging removals to Italy is due to be heard at the end of March at the high court in London. None of the individuals involved are Syrian, but if successful, their appeal would have a more general application for vulnerable asylum seekers.



After a ruling against the Home Office from the European court of justice in 2013, lone children cannot be removed under the Dublin rule. However, lawyers say Syrian children still face other obstacles within the UK asylum system.

Deirdre Sheahan, a solicitor at Paragon Law who specialises in helping Syrian children who arrive in the UK alone, says they face removal proceedings as soon as they near 18 if they have trouble proving they are Syrian.



“In a decision we received for an 18-year adult Syrian male, the Home Office believe he is from Egypt,” she said. “When a person flees their country, stopping to gather documentation is not always feasible nor something that would be a priority for them. I work with a lot of young Kurds from Syria. They face particular difficulties because they were a persecuted minority under the Assad regime and many never had official documentation.”







Syrians need visas to enter the UK legally, and the number of approvals has been falling. Applications have remained steady at about 8,000 a year, but while 70% were granted in 2010, the figure had fallen to 50% by 2012, and 39% last year.

Barrister Colin Yeo, who runs the Free Movement immigration blog, said: “The immigration rules for visits to the UK require the applicant to show an intention to return to the home country. The Home Office clearly takes the view that people are unlikely to want to return to a warzone and therefore refuses the applications, although often giving different reasons.

“The UK government seems hell-bent on keeping Syrians out, whatever the humanitarian cost.”



The Ahmed family are from Deraa, where the Syrian uprising first broke out four years ago. The oldest of eight children, Khalil Ahmed, now 25, was studying in the UK when war broke out so was able to apply for asylum from within the country.



After Ahmed’s father, Ibrahim, was detained and tortured by the Syrian security services the family abandoned their home and travelled to Cairo.



Family reunification laws do not allow people to bring parents or siblings to the UK so Khalil Ahmed began to carefully orchestrate his family’s journey to safety, paying for every step with the wages he earns as a delivery driver for a British supermarket.



As a husband and father, Ibrahim would be able to use the reunification laws to bring over his wife and the rest of his children legally, so he set out to join Khalil in the UK. But when the Italian authorities rescued him in the Mediterranean, they took his fingerprints. After smuggling himself into the UK and claiming asylum, he was told under the Dublin rules he would have to go back to Italy.

With his father fighting to stay in the UK, Ahmed decided he needed to bring his mother, Amira, across the Mediterranean route. He spent $4,000 on smugglers’ fees so that she could cross Europe and join him, leaving her five youngest children living in a Cairo mosque. “It took two months of thinking about it, it’s such a difficult journey. But we needed to bring our family over and be together.”



Amira made it to the UK without having her fingerprints taken and was given asylum. At the end of February her children finally joined her on the longed-for family reunification visa.



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Now they are together but Ibrahim Ahmed is still fighting the Home Office for the right to stay with his family in the UK. Khalil says they will be devastated if his father is sent back to Italy. “I am responsible for my family now. My parents are poor, rural people, they are not educated. My father is old and tired, he knows nobody in Italy, he doesn’t speak Italian. He loves my mother so much and cannot bear to be apart from her, he has been married to her for nearly 30 years.”

A Home Office spokesperson said that the UK would continue to uphold the Dublin regulations and dismissed the idea of opening up legal routes from Italy and Greece into the UK.

“The UK has been at the forefront of the international response to the humanitarian crisis in Syria. We have pledged £800m, making us the second largest bilateral donor in the world. Since the crisis began we have also given sanctuary to nearly 4,000 Syrian nationals.”



“However, we firmly believe in the established principle that those in need of protection should seek asylum in the first safe country they enter,” the spokesperson added.