Today the family division of the high court ruled that it has no power to stop the home secretary from deporting a vulnerable girl at risk of female genital mutilation (FGM) to Bahrain or Sudan.
Jasmine (not her real name) is 10 years old. As a barrister, I have seen how the government’s hostile immigration environment extends to refusing asylum claims on the basis of FGM, leaving girls and women liable to deportation to countries where this practice is prevalent, if not the norm. The government claims it is committed to supporting victims of FGM and prosecuting perpetrators. Yet when girls at risk of being cut claim asylum, they are turned away.
FGM is a gross abuse of human rights and is a recognised ground for asylum. But the Home Office often claims that, contrary to the evidence, the risk of FGM in such cases is low. They say the mother can single-handedly protect her daughter from familial or community pressure to undergo FGM; or that, just because the mother has been cut, it does not follow that her daughter will be cut; or the state can protect the girl from FGM even though laws to allow this have never been enforced.
Research into women’s asylum claims in Europe shows that decision-makers apply too high a standard of proof, requiring independent evidence of a kind virtually impossible to obtain, and are insensitive to the impact of shame and trauma caused by FGM on the willingness of women to be frank in their evidence.
The practice remains prevalent in at least 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. More than 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM, and 3 million girls are at risk of being cut each year. There are no statistics on the numbers of FGM asylum claims each year in the UK. According to the UN high commissioner for refugees, of the 25,000 girls and women seeking asylum in Europe in the first nine months of 2014, 71% had already been cut. In 2011, more than 2,000 women claiming asylum in the UK were from FGM-risk countries – a quarter of female asylum claims. The numbers are rising each year.
In the family division of the high court, Karon Monaghan QC and I represented Jasmine’s mother, who was desperately trying to protect her daughter from facing the same abusive fate she had suffered as a child. The mother underwent type III FGM, the most physically severe. One of the single biggest indicators that a girl is at risk is her mother having been cut. The mother, who is of Sudanese origin with Bahraini citizenship, says her two sisters died as a result of the brutal practice.
The family arrived in the UK in 2012, when Jasmine was three years old. The home secretary refused the asylum claim in 2015 and the immigration courts turned down her appeal applications. The family had reached the end of the road. Though both social services and the National FGM Centre agree that Jasmine is at high risk of FGM if deported, in September 2018 the Home Office told the family they would be put on a flight and removed to Bahrain.
In 2015, I and a group of human rights lawyers successfully lobbied the Conservative-led coalition to introduce FGM protection orders – designed, for example, to allow a court to order a girl’s passport to be held to prevent her from leaving the country. In Jasmine’s case, social services applied for a protection order to stop the home secretary from removing her, which the court granted. But the home secretary challenged the family court’s power to make an order stopping deportation.
Today, the president of the family court accepted the home secretary’s position – that it has no power to stop the government from deporting Jasmine even if it believes there is a high risk of FGM. The court is entrusted with making life-changing decisions about a child’s welfare, yet today it decided to limit its own power to keep girls safe from FGM.
This government is more concerned with its vote-oriented commitment to reduce immigration rather than to enforceits obligation to enforce the UK’s international law to promote and protect the welfare of vulnerable girls like Jasmine. In doing so, it exposes a glaring double standard. On the one hand it postures about its commitment to prosecute minority ethnic parents in the UK over FGM, yet on the other hand it deports women and girls at risk of mutilation abroad.
If the government was genuinely committed to protecting women and girls from FGM, it would be concerned with them being cut overseas. All the international evidence shows, and the law fundamentally recognises, that FGM is a transnational crime. Jasmine’s case is continuing. Her mother has not given up hope. We will try to persuade the home secretary to accept expert assessments and grant her secure immigration status. The alternative may destroy this 10-year-old’s life.
• Charlotte Proudman is a human rights barrister specialising in violence against women and girls
