UK: Bombers "not refugees"
01 November 1994
The Court of Appeal continued the trend towards drawing the definition of "refugee" ever narrower so as to exclude more and more people from the protection of the Geneva Convention in a judgment in November. T, an Algerian, sought asylum in Britain on the basis that, as a member of the FIS, he would be persecuted by the Algerian authorities. T admitted to having participated in a raid on an army post in which one person was killed, and to having known about a plan to bomb the airport which went ahead and killed ten people. In order to exclude T from protection the Home Office had to show that he had been guilty of "serious non-political crimes". The court said that the crimes T was involved in could be characterised as "non-political" since the more violent and atrocious the crime, the more disproportionate to its purpose, the harder it was to show that it was calculated to promote the purpose of the group who did it in a coherent way.
The ruling followed hard on the heels of the decision by the European Commission on Human Rights to admit the claim of Karamjit Singh Chahal against the UK for further investigation. Chahal, a Sikh activist, has been detained for deportation to India for over two years on the ground that he is a terrorist and that national security considerations override his claims to refugee status.
However the Commission, declaring his case admissible, is understood to have indicated that at the very least more detailed reasons ought to have been given to overrule his asylum claim. Chahal's case differs from that of T in that he denies involvement in armed struggle.
The European spokesman for the PKK, Kani Yilmaz, who was admitted to Britain on 23 October for a series of meetings, found himself arrested by 12 police officers as he approached the Palace of Westminster three days later. Yilmaz has come to Britain twice before from Germany, where he has refugee status, but on this occasion the Home Office said he should not have been allowed in. He is detained at Belmarsh maximum security prison pending deportation on national security grounds, against which he has no appeal, only the right to a hearing before the "three wise men", a national security advisory panel. Liberal Democrat peer Lord Avebury, a human rights activist who has been banned from Turkey on public order grounds, believes that the decision by the Home Office to ban Yilmaz came about as a result of a meeting with the Turkish ambassador in October. Since Yilmaz's arrest Kurdish supporters have maintained a vigil for him. 1,200 marched in mid-November, when there were five arrests.