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Dozens
of failed asylum seekers are being left destitute by
Home Office rules, the Welsh Refugee Council claims.
The charity said around 100 people in Cardiff who
have exhausted the appeals process face being left
on the street or returned to their own country.
It is calling for a review of cases where displaced
people are removed from their accommodation but not
sent home.
The Home Office said the government had a right to
send back people whose asylum claim was deemed not
legitimate.
Jazim, a 20-year-old Iraqi Kurd who has lived in
Cardiff since arriving in the UK three years ago, is
one of 350 so-called "asylum overstayers" in Wales.
He fled to Britain from Saddam Hussein's regime in
Iraq, where he said he had been imprisoned and
beaten, but the Home Office has decided he is not
entitled to refugee status and should return to his
home city of Mosul.
Jazim was not allowed to work while his asylum
application was considered and his benefits have
been cut off, so he relies on a few friends to feed
him while he waits for the outcome of a court
challenge by a man in a similar position to his own.
He is one of 106 "overstayers" currently in Cardiff,
44 of them Iraqi.
Crisis point
He said: "I don't like going back to Iraq. All the
people are being killed."
The Welsh Refugee Council said welfare groups in the
city have been handing out around 50 food parcels a
week for the past three months to people whose
claims for asylum have been rejected by the
government but who have not yet been deported.
It said some of these people have been evicted from
their accommodation because they had not taken
so-called 'hard case support' which would see them
given food and lodging provided they signed up to
being returned home.
The council said some of the overstayers who had
taken hard case support had still not been returned
home because the Home Office acknowledged that the
security situation was unacceptable.
The Reverend Aled Edwards, of Cardiff's Destitute
Asylum Seeker Group, said that with the colder
weather, and the Christmas break imminent, welfare
groups were reaching a crisis point.
'Legitimate claim'
He said: "The system is basically saying go
destitute or sign that they are willing to go home.
"One part of the system rejects them, but another
does not want to take them home.
"To date, we still don't have the stomach to send
people back to Iraq or Zimbabwe."
A Home Office spokesman said: "The hard case support
is given to people when they have gone through the
appeals process and do not have a legitimate claim
and have exhausted their rights of appeal.
"Under those circumstances, the UK Government has a
right to send these people back.
"Sometimes it does take some time, but it's not
always the case that it's always a security matter,
it could be travel document matter."
http://news.bbc.co.uk
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