The cruellest blow: Torture victims’ charity warns Home Office policies are inflicting fresh agony on asylum seekers
Psychotherapist reveals ministers’ hardline
Apsychotherapist working with torture survivors seeking safe shelter in Britain fears the Home Office intention to create a “hostile environment” is stripping them of their rights.
Fiona Crombie warns hardline immigration policies have led to already- traumatised people being left destitute and wrongly detained.
Ms Crombie, head clinician with a charity called Freedom from Torture, said the Home Office stance was inflicting a devastating impact on vulnerable people who desperately needed help after being tortured by oppressive states such as Sri Lanka and Iran. Nearly 100 people, mostly asylum seekers, are supported by Freedom from Torture at its only Scottish facility in the south side of Glasgow.
Ms Crombie and her colleagues counsel people, including women and children, who have suffered beatings, whippings, burnings and rape before fleeing to Britain. Psychological terror is also widespread with some victims forced to listen to other people, including family members, being tortured.
Some victims have suffered mock executions while others were offered unimaginable choices to end their pain including the betrayal of close friends and relatives.
Many survivors living in Scotland suffer from post traumatic stress disorder ( PTSD) and suicidal thoughts.
Aside from counselling people, Freedom from Torture helps them to integrate into communities and the charity plays a vital role in claims for political asylum by producing medico-legal reports (MLRS).
These documents verify claims of torture and doctors producing them have a legal duty to be accurate and unbiased.
Yet despite the charity’s credibility and breadth of experience stretching back more than 30 years, Freedom
from Torture says that Home Office officials without medical expertise are undermining reports when considering asylum applications.
Crombie said that under the UK Government’s “hostile environment”, enacted by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary, people’s rights have been stripped away.
She said: “It’s been getting worse recently and I think it will get progressively worse.
“People’s rights are being eroded slowly and quietly. When you put all the pieces of the jigsaw together, it’s not looking good.”
Ms Crombie cited the case of one person she was counselling who was recently detained by the authorities and taken to Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre and held for a week, before being freed.
“That’s an ongoing problem. It’s a decision outwith your control – and you go through the anxiety of what it means for mental health.
“To sit with a therapeutic dilemma of managing the setbacks and all that entails – the re- traumatisation, the impact for them. The standard of proof is really high and the documentation and evidence they are looking for is hard to produce, and if there is a chink of inconsistency then they go with that.
“They would quite happily say ‘you are not telling the truth’ – it could be something such as makes of vehicles, times, dates, places – they use to dispute, but who can remember 13 years ago whether it was a Tuesday or a Wednesday?”
Torture victims are not supposed to be detained in the UK. But Freedom from Torture has condemned the Home Office’s implementation of Rule 35.
Devised to protect vulnerable people in detention, the idea was that concerns raised by a doctor would likely result in a detainee alleging torture being released.
But a recent report by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons ( HMCIP) revealed that the Home Office overruled expert medical advice in more than two- thirds of cases. HMCIP’S report followed an unannounced inspection of Dungavel House, Scotland’s only immigration removal detention centre, in July last year.
The report said that of 49 Rule 35 reports over the previous six months, only 13 had led to people being released.
This meant that 36 tor ture victims were kept imprisoned despite having suffered experiences that often led to PTSD and suicidal thoughts.
Ms Crombie also commented on a recent ruling by the Supreme Court which said judges were wrong to claim that an asylum seeker may have faked injuries that he said were inflicted by torturers in Sri Lanka.
In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court found that evidence of asylum seekers conspiring with others to fake evidence of torture was “almost non-existent”.
Freedom from Torture said this was a significant ruling and lambasted the Home Office’s “deplorable efforts” to discredit the claims of torture survivors seeking sanctuary.
Ms Crombie said: “While we haven’t seen cases of this in the Glasgow centre we know that all over the country, torture survivors are disbelieved.
“For years, FFT has recorded how independent expert medical evidence has been dismissed, circumvented or ignored in order to deny torture survivors safety in the UK.
“It’s good news for us in that they ( Home Office) need to investigate more thoroughly client’s explanations but also not to make the presumption that people are lying about something that can’t be physically, easily, identified.
“Claims should not be dismissed because you can’t see them (injuries).”
Ms Crombie also spoke about the charity’s Healing Neighbourhoods, a project which aims to help survivors settle in communities.
“We have a very energetic and outspoken community of survivors, and the Healing Neighbourhoods project has played a vital role,” she said.
Freedom from Torture has helped around 50,000 people rebuild their lives. Its Glasgow centre opened in July 2004.
The Home Office said: “The UK has a proud history of granting asylum to those who need our protection. All claims for asylum are considered on their individual merits. Where people establish a genuine need for protection, or a well-founded fear of prosecution, refuge will be granted.”