QARN prepares for 2024 general election

‘We’ve prepared a policy leaflet that Friends could use in outreach to MPs and party candidates in this pre-election period – and we’ve also updated a few of our other leaflets.‘

Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN) has produced a new leaflet for Friends to share with MPs and party candidates on immigration issues.

Ginny Baumann, from QARN, told the Friend: ‘We’ve prepared a policy leaflet that Friends could use in outreach to MPs and party candidates in this pre-election period – and we’ve also updated a few of our other leaflets.‘

The leaflet highlights positive policies that could be adopted, to help create a fair, humane and supportive environment.

Titled ‘QARN: What do Quakers hope for, after the 2024 General Election’, the leaflet asks MPs and voters ‘to support fair and humane practical alternatives – policies that will allow the UK to have a credible role in international arrangements on migration and asylum’, citing QARN’s six policy recommendations.

These include ‘faster, fairer decisions’ referring to the ‘more than two-thirds of asylum seekers who have to wait over six months for an initial decision – nearly a ten-fold increase since 2016’. It also recommends lifting the ban on asylum seekers working, and a ‘radical amendment or repeal of the so-called Illegal Migration Act’. ‘This shameful Act may mean that people seeking sanctuary, including children, will be incarcerated on a massive scale, leaving thousands in limbo for long periods. The Act leaves victims of slavery unprotected and empowers the traffickers,’ it says.

According to QARN, the act also goes against people’s values in the UK, citing a 2022 Ipsos Mori poll which found that eighty per cent of respondents believed people should be able to take refuge in other countries, including Britain, to escape war and persecution.

The leaflet also calls for alternatives to immigration detention, branding it ‘unjust and inhumane’, and quoting Gabriel, from Freed Voices, a refugee who had been held in immigration detention. ‘Indefinite detention is a torture, it melts your brain. I’ve seen intelligent people forget how to write their names inside. Healthcare has everyone drugged up on sleeping pills. You forget court dates, you don’t trust anyone, even your solicitor or visiting groups. You confuse your story, you get in fights. Ultimately, your claim suffers. It is a vicious cycle.’

Recommending that people should not be locked up without judicial oversight, and that child asylum seekers should never be imprisoned, the leaflet points out that ‘the UK regime has no time limit for such detention, despite continuing evidence of the extra mental damage this causes. The current removal and detention centres are widely seen as a disgrace to the UK. In March 2023, 1,591 people were being held in immigration detention. During the whole of 2022, a total of 20,446 people were held in detention and most were then released back into the community to continue their asylum claim. The new Illegal Migration Act is expected to massively increase the numbers in detention’.

The leaflets can be downloaded at https://qarn.org.uk/qarn-leaflets-download-them-here.

---

Comments

Please login to add a comment