A migrant was spared deportation because of his tattoos. Reports from the UK immigration courts show how an initial Home Office decision—that he could safely be returned to the Kurdish-controlled part of Iraq—was overturned because this risked his inhumane treatment under the terms of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
The man’s asylum claim began, he says, when his father and uncle threatened to kill him over some ‘body art,’ which they say “deviated from the principles of Islam.” Initial efforts to forcibly remove the tattoos by burning escalated into an alleged plot to carry out an “honour killing.” According to court documents, the man—referred to as “AA”—was saved when his brother retrieved his passport from the family home and placed him on a flight out of Iraq.
For the Home Office, the issue was not the veracity of the story, but whether AA could re-enter his home part of Iraq while avoiding his dangerous male relatives. Now an immigration judge has ruled this would not be possible, since AA has no identity documents separate from his passport to help him get through local checkpoints. Secondly, AA has claimed that his father and uncle’s links to their homeland’s ruling Patriotic Union of Kurdistan make it impossible for him to live and travel safely in the territory.
The Home Office—at least tenuously connected to the British electorate—was supported in overruling AA’s argument by a first tier tribunal. Now, however, the ECHR-based appeal was granted by Judge Makesh Joshi, who also found that AA’s mother and/or brother would be endangered if they were asked to supply their relatives with suitable travel documents. (He has not ruled—yet—whether the duo would also qualify for asylum in Britain should they request it.)
Whatever the merits of this case, its credibility is undermined by a wider crisis of confidence in the system, where whether a migrant joined a terror group or has strong preferences in chicken nuggets can prompt soft immigration judges to make questionable decisions.
