Guardian: Downing Street guest faces deportation
The Guardian and the Independent today reported on the bizarre story of Farhat Khan, a woman who fled to the UK on advice from a colleague at the British Council in Pakistan after facing abuse from her husband and his family for defying their views on women working. She is claiming that she faces murder if she returns to where she comes from in Pakistan. In the UK, she has been working advising the local Asian community, which is how she was invited to meetings with the Queen and the Blairs.
This is obviously a very sad case, because the woman is clearly a valued member of the local community. Perhaps she might be able to move down to London and work as a traffic warden, because there always seems to be room for more foreign traffic wardens to enforce unjust British traffic laws on an unappreciative populace. Family-related violence is much more common than political oppression in many parts of the world, and the UK cannot take in every victim of it. However, when someone is as obviously respected in their community here as this lady seems to be, it is ridiculous to send her back to Pakistan to face likely murder.
(Also see this shocking report from last Wednesday, about the culture of disbelief and downright racism among a group of British immigration judges, particularly when dealing with women who have experienced rape as well as other forms of persecution in their home countries. It just goes to show what happens when the government sets immigration and asylum targets in order to keep the commercial press off its back.)
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- Two examples of UK immigration madness
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