Return Of Asylum Seekers To Darfur

EDM number 2108 in 2006-07, proposed by John Bercow on 15/10/2007.

That this House deplores the continued use of arbitrary detention, beatings, mock executions and torture inflicted by the Sudanese security services upon Darfuris forcibly returned to Khartoum by UK immigration officials, as highlighted in the report Lives We Throw Away, produced by international genocide prevention organisation the Aegis Trust, which draws attention to five separate incidents of torture of Darfuris in the last three years; notes that on at least two occasions deportees were beaten in Khartoum airport even before UK immigration officials had left to return to the UK; further notes that the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, in its latest position paper on Sudanese Asylum Seekers from Darfur, states that `no non-Arab Sudanese originating from Darfur should be forcibly returned until such time as there is a significant improvement in the security situation in Darfur' and that `where internal displacement is a result of ethnic cleansing policies, denying refugee status on the basis of the internal flight or relocation concept could be interpreted as condoning the resulting situation on the ground'; notes as applicable the precedent set by the Government during the Kosovo conflict in 1999 where Kosovan Muslims were not deported to Belgrade but returned directly to their homes only when it was safe for them to return; and calls on the Government immediately to suspend its policy of deporting Darfuri asylum seekers until it is safe for them to return directly to Darfur.

This motion has been signed by a total of 55 MPs.