100 signatures reached
To: Sajid Javid - Home Secretary
Bring Back Appeal & Work Rights for Migrants whose immigration applications gets refused
Please bring back Appeal and Work Rights for people who believe they have unjustly been refused the right to stay in the UK, so they can make their case in court.
The 2014 Immigration Act severely restricted access to legal appeals for people who lost the right to be in the UK. Their right to work was also removed or restricted.
Judicial Review is the only option for these people. But JR not only costs thousands, it can take up to a year or more to be decided and migrants can still be left in Limbo as the Home office uses a tactic of giving a consent order and could refuse them again.
The approach of the Home Office runs contrary to the principles of justice and fairness: https://www.freemovement.org.uk/guest-post-are-home-office-consent-orders-worth-it/
Why is this important?
Those who lose the right to appeal and to work go from being tax-paying, productive members of society to destitute, piling up huge debts and feeling desperate. They might end up on streets or be forced to work illegally to put food in their children’s mouths.
If these people are allowed to work in the UK while their cases are in the court, they can continue paying taxes and their lives, and those of their children, are not devastated while waiting for what is often, a positive outcome to their case:
50 percent of the immigration appeals succeeds: https://www.freemovement.org.uk/half-of-all-immigration-appeals-now-succeed/
Home Office loses 75% of its appeals against immigration rulings: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/03/inhumane-three-quarters-of-home-office-asylum-appeals-fail
Windrush and the recent cases of Toiec and 322(5) have taught us that appeal rights and work rights are desperately important if unjust decisions by the Home Office are to be challenged.
There is increasing recognition that to deny people the right to appeal and to work, is inhuman. In a recent court ruling, the judge said a seriously ill woman could work while fighting deportation: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/aug/21/court-says-seriously-ill-woman-can-work-while-fighting-uk-deportation
I know people who have been out of work for two years or more. They lose their mental sanity.
How they survive is unimaginable: I knew a family who used to mix water in milk to feed their children! The stories are shocking - people who have always worked and never borrowed money are piling up enormous debts, paying huge interest rates, going to food banks, feeding their disabled children out of date food thrown out by supermarkets. The list goes on.
Recently, in a House of Lords debate, Lord Taverne accused the Home Office of “not only breaking every canon of a civilised society [but] ignoring one of the most basic tenets of the rule of law: the golden rule that someone is assumed innocent until proven guilty”.
Removing and restricting the right to appeal and to work, means innocent people are brutally punished before they’re even proved guilty. Please sign this petition: I am asking for basic rights and fair access to justice for these people.
