Another Victim

Osman Rasul is sadly just the latest in a long line of victims of the UK's barbaric immigration and asylum prevention regime (for that is what it effectively is) that is so divorced from reality that it can keep thousands of people waiting in legal limbo, often destitute and homeless when not being kept in one the government's glorified internment camps, for years on end (in Osman's case nine frustrating and ultimately hopeless years).

An Iraqi Kurd, he had arrived in the UK in 2001 claiming asylum as his life was in danger from one of the main Kurdish political factions. Like so many products of the West's war against Saddam who have managed to make it to these shores, the country in part responsible for his plight turned its back on him, refusing his asylum application.

Thus he became a typical destitute asylum seeker, surviving on £20 a month in charitable donations plus gifts of food from friends and organisations like the Nottingham Refugee Forum, and sleeping rough on the streets. He set about trying to make a fresh asylum claim but any chance of that was ended when Refugee and Migrant Justice was forced into administration, depriving him of access to legal aid and expert immigration advice.

The final straw was when he travelled down to Croydon to visit the UK Border Agency offices that all refugees are forced to travel to where ever they live in England in order to make an asylum claim. He asked them to either accept his claim or send him back to Iraq. Instead, they told him to go away and find a solicitor. Fat chance of that as only half of the solicitors firms that carried out immigration and asylum work are now able to do so following the Legal Aid reforms and his chances of getting one of them to take his case were slim.

So instead he jumped from the seventh floor of a Nottingham tower block.