London, United Kingdom – When Ismail finally touched down on British soil early last year, after being smuggled over land and through the air from Somalia, he believed he was finally on the verge of beginning a new life.
“The Britain I had in mind was one in which they welcomed people of different colour, different religion and different backgrounds and where human rights were respected,” Ismail, who preferred not to use his real name, told Al Jazeera.
“I wanted to live in a safe place where I could just study and work and help my family and support myself, so what happened to me was a big shock.”
Less than a year after failing in his bid to claim asylum in the UK, Ismail found himself handcuffed, forcibly placed aboard an airplane bound for the Somali capital, Mogadishu – a journey Ismail holds would have effectively been a death sentence.
Ismail is one of a handful of known cases of Somali refugees recently detained and told they are to be returned to their conflict-stricken country, despite the severe security concerns and legal obstacles that have made it virtually impossible until now for British immigration officials to send them home.
Members of Somali communities in the UK, as well as campaign groups and solicitors working on behalf of asylum seekers, say they fear these cases point to a tougher approach and a new returns programme at the Home Office, the UK’s interior ministry – one that could endanger the lives of many others whose asylum claims are rejected.
“When I told people in the Somali community what the Home Office was doing to me they said, ‘No, that’s impossible, it’s unheard of. Nobody is stupid enough to remove people to Mogadishu,'” said Ismail.
‘Be quiet’
Yet at the end of January, after three weeks in a detention centre near a London airport, Ismail was bundled into a van, pushed aboard a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul and seated at the back of the plane between three guards tasked with removing him from the UK.
| I was already resigned to the death sentence that awaited me. I was helpless. I was mentally tortured. Ismail, Somali asylum seeker, |
“I said, ‘Please don’t take me back to Somalia. I came here seeking asylum and security. Don’t take me to Mogadishu because you are signing my death penalty’. I was shouting and screaming at the other passengers for help. Every time I tried to shout out, they’d twist my fingers to make me be quiet.”
On arriving in Istanbul, Ismail’s escorts asked Turkish immigration officials to place him in a cell. During the flight, he said, they had discussed going sightseeing and “chilling out” in the city while they waited for a connecting flight to Mogadishu.
Then one of them received a phone call. Ismail’s solicitor had secured a judicial review of his case. Instead of going to Mogadishu, he was flown back to London and returned to another detention centre.
“I was already resigned to the death sentence that awaited me,” he said. “I was helpless. I was mentally tortured.”
The UK has long had a policy of returning Somalis whose asylum claims are rejected to less volatile regions of the country that are safely accessible by air, such as Somaliland. But most of the country, including Mogadishu, has long been considered too dangerous as a return destination because of the ongoing conflict between government forces and al-Shabab rebels.
But Paul Morris, a volunteer at the Somali Adult Social Care Agency in Manchester, said the UK government appeared to have been emboldened by a European Court of Human Rights judgment in a Swedish case last September, which ruled in favour of allowing repatriations to Mogadishu in circumstances where a returnee was not deemed to be at specific risk.
