Joint letter to the Home Secretary

Dear Home Secretary,

We write to you as organisations defending the human rights of migrants and refugees, to urge you to act immediately to offer a generous and compassionate response to the crisis in Afghanistan, reflective of our country’s values and our capabilities.

The fall of Afghanistan to Taliban forces places the rights and lives of millions of people at risk. Reports confirm that widespread killings have already begun, with women and girls, ethnic minorities, LGBTIQ+ people, journalists and anyone seen as supporting an international organisation or the Afghan Government, throughout the country including Kabul, in immediate danger. This raises an enormous and urgent challenge to the Government’s current approach to refugee protection. History will judge how we respond.

There is now a critical need to swiftly establish sustainable protection solutions for Afghans already living in the UK, their families and loved ones, and for those who will inevitably flee and seek to reach our protection over the coming weeks and months.

To achieve this, the Government must urgently take the following steps:

1. Immediately publish new policy guidance that reflects the clear need for international protection for all those at risk.
2. Introduce a simplified process to grant immediate protection to any person from Afghanistan with an outstanding protection claim, and to facilitate expedited decisions on fresh or new claims going forwards.
3. No Afghan should be evicted from asylum accommodation.
4. Address limitations on access to family reunification for people from Afghanistan. Applications must be expedited, and criteria widened to include, for example, parents and siblings of applicants. Normal procedures requiring applications to take place through embassies must similarly be suspended.
5. No Afghan nationals should be in immigration detention and all those currently in detention should be released, given the impossibility of safely effectuating removals.
6. No Afghan national should be subjected to inadmissibility procedures and face removal to any third country.
7. Afghan Locally Employed Staff Relocation schemes must protect people working in all at-risk professions.

A wide-scale international resettlement effort is desperately needed to evacuate people from the country and the surrounding region. However, the horrifying scenes of a deadly scramble for safety at Kabul airport this week demonstrate why a resettlement-only approach to refugee protection, as proposed in the Nationality and Borders Bill currently before Parliament, cannot work.

It is not feasible for refugees to wait for undefined periods of time in unsafe situations in the hope of resettlement in the context of what we have seen. Regulated travel is not a viable option. Many people need to flee urgently and by any means necessary, including by making irregular journeys. These must not be penalised.

We urge the Government more strongly than ever, therefore, to abandon its inadmissibility rules and its decision to delegitimise and criminalise refugee journeys that are not undertaken through regulated resettlement routes. Refugees reaching our shores must have their claims assessed based solely on need and never on their method of flight. It is not too late to reverse these dangerous policies and to move to provide a world-leading, compassionate response to this crisis.

We look forward to hearing from you shortly.

Yours Sincerely,