Wrongful prosecutions add to refugee woe | @guardianletters
 Your report on a Syrian asylum-seeker (18 February) made for pretty grim reading. I cannot comment on Mr Chikho's case. But I can tell you that the wrongful criminal prosecution of genuine refugees has been all too common in recent years. Attempting to enter this country using false identity documents or genuine documents belonging to someone else is – rightly - a criminal offence. But parliament created a statutory defence for refugees genuinely fleeing persecution section 31 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 and section 2 of the Immigration and Asylum (Treatment of Claimants) Act 2004. Someone fleeing for their life from a brutal dictatorship, a war-torn country or from a failed state will not be able to call into their local post office to obtain an up-to-date passport. The Criminal Cases Review Commission has to date referred 21 cases of refugees fleeing persecution for appeal. Convictions have been quashed in all of these heard by the courts so far. We are reviewing or are about to review 60 or so other cases. There may be many hundreds more who have yet to come forward. It is absolutely right that we should safeguard our borders against anyone who seeks, improperly, to enter the country. But equally we should not add unnecessarily to the misery of the genuinely persecuted by wrongfully prosecuting them for an offence of which they are not guilty and for which charges should never have been brought. There is also the cost. We expect publicly funded defence lawyers and prosecutors to understand the law and not advise clients to plead guilty inappropriately or to bring prosecutions unnecessarily or wrongly. There is the waste of public money on legal aid, on prosecution costs, on the original court case, on our costs in reviewing the case and of the courts and the lawyers (again) in reconsidering the conviction. To say nothing of the costs of imprisonment itself. There may also be subsequent claims for compensation and redress. And all this on top of the unnecessary suffering and distress being imposed on those who – surely – have already suffered more than enough. Like Mr Chikho, I hope Syrian refugees who arrive here have a better start than he did. I hope that anyone who arrives here genuinely escaping persecution will be treated properly, humanely and respectfully. British justice is still, rightly, regarded as gold standard. We must keep it that way. theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds |
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