Read this article and felt nothing but shame and profound anger that this country’s policy on asylum and immigration should have degenerated to this. What sort of society have we become where families are carted away at day break to be put on a plane and taken to a country where they can be tortured to death? The government is guilty of more than moral duplicity and cowardice : it is gulity of evil . And this evil wears a suit.
Austin Mitchell: Treatment of model family makes me ashamed to be a Labour MP
‘Model family’ is deported in handcuffs. Father is left ‘badly bruised’ and denied vital medicine. Minister’s office misled local MP
Published: 01 February 2007
Hearts must have been uplifted by the news that Liam Byrne, our Immigration minister, and his team are deporting failed asylum seekers at a record rate of one every 27 minutes. Our borders defended at last. Particularly against women, children and anyone who’s easy to grab.
This good news is very different on the ground as is shown by the deportation of the Bokhari family, wife, husband, and four lovely kids aged between eight and 14, from Grimsby. Sibtain Bokhari was a rights lawyer in Lahore, a Shia in a Sunni dominated area, where Wahhabi extremism flourishes and terrorist attacks on mosques and the minority are regular. He came to Britain in 2001 to a rights conference. On his return he was accused of being a Blair stooge, something not as career-enhancing there as it is here, and a spy. His office was set on fire, his wife fired from her job, his home stoned by students from the local madrassa.
The police, who had arrested his brother-in-law on a charge of mosque bombing, offered no protection. So Bokhari brought his family to Britain and to Grimsby, applying for asylum within three days of arrival in September 2003.
So far so normal. His application was rejected. The tribunal concurred on the grounds that the Pakistani police would protect him. He appealed through various lawyers but the response was a dawn raid in June 2005, carting the family to a deportation centre. At this point I took up the case, intervened with the minister on the grounds that he hadn’t had representations from me, had them brought back to Grimsby and began to put up the case.
The children, all at Grimsby schools, were model pupils. The parents were school governors, model citizens and well loved. Minister McNulty replied that this was very nice but didn’t count. He also rejected all my evidence from Pakistan about the dangers they’d face on return, though a stray note from an official sent me by accident revealed that documents in a foreign language were not translated for ministers. Perhaps he spoke Urdu, though I don’t think he even saw them.