The government would do well to remember Britain’s commitment to human rights

Editorial: A gay woman who was attacked after being unlawfully deported to Uganda has won her court case against the Home Office. The danger now is the government will learn precisely the wrong lessons

A gay woman who was unlawfully deported to Uganda has won her case against the Home Office (Getty)

All too often, refugees are regarded as an amorphous, objectified, dehumanised “commodity”, a problem to be transported and disposed of, and by the authorities as much as the people traffickers.  

In reality, as the appalling case of PN we reported on makes clear, they are people, with their own stories and their own inalienable human rights. In PN’s case they also have voices and they are ready to speak up. PN has to remain anonymous for reasons that will be obvious.

Seven years ago, under the Home Office’s “fast track” procedure, PN was returned to Uganda. Officials did not believe that she was gay, and were oblivious to the persecution of gay people in Uganda (where same sex relationships are unlawful). She was bundled off to Kampala, and no doubt the ministers and the staff concerned thought they’d heard the last of her, as appeals are far more difficult to launch from abroad.  

They were wrong. Having suffered a gang rape and the subsequent traumatic birth of a child, PN persisted, though living in fear for her safety in Uganda. The High Court ruled that fast track deportations from the UK were in principle unlawful back in 2015; now PN has won her own appeal against the Home Office. She urges others who have similarly suffered from the arbitrary activities of the British Home Office to reclaim their right to asylum. 

This saga of betrayal was hardly unique to PN, and the net result of the fast track policy is entirely counterproductive as far as the government is concerned. It was an appalling blunder on every level. Whatever controls on migration and procedures for asylum seekers are deemed appropriate, including the present disturbing rumours about disapplying human rights laws, the rules should be implemented lawfully. That was not the case for much of the last decade. Following PN’s brave example, many more asylum seekers will find safety in Britain, and be free to make a new life here.  

The danger now is the government will learn precisely the wrong lessons. The Conservative manifesto contained a number of ill-concealed attacks on the rights of refugees, including reforming the Human Rights Act, abandoning the EU Dublin Convention after Brexit (even though the convention ironically tends to help the British authorities), and curbing judicial review.

Recent rumours suggest that a new law will override not only the existing Human Rights Act but the UK’s treaty obligations under the 1950 European Human Rights Convention and judged by the European Court of Human Rights (both of which predate and have nothing to do with the European Union). It would not be the first time the Johnson government casually proposed to break international law. It would place Britain in the same category as Belarus.  

The struggle to protect long-established human rights in Britain, in other words, is about to become even more difficult. To be sure, Britain is not Kim’s North Korea, Duterte’s Philippines or, indeed, Museveni’s Uganda. Most people live their lives without the kind of abuse of personal liberty and arbitrary arrest that are routine elsewhere. Yet there is a continuing, grinding, incremental erosion of media freedom, the independence of the courts and the application of universal human rights.

The refugees, for all-too flagrant political reasons, are the most vulnerable to the creeping denial of rights enshrined after the horrors of the last world war, rights fought for and enshrined in treaty form by the British. It was an act of atonement for ignoring the sufferings of a previous generation of refugees.  

The human rights in the European Convention and the United Nations’ Declaration are for all. Such freedoms cannot be set aside by some here-today-gone-tomorrow British cabinet; they are universal, inviolable and eternal.