Lawyers in the UK have been caught agreeing to create bogus asylum seeker back stories including false accounts of sexual torture, slavery, beatings, death threats, and false imprisonment.
The Daily Mail revealed what happened when one of its reporters posed as an illegal boat migrant seeking legal aid in order to gain permission to stay in the UK.
The report says a lawyer identified as VP Lingajothy asked for £10,000 to represent the undercover reporter in the course of which he advised the man to invent a backstory despite being made aware that he had no legitimate claim for asylum in the country.
Another lawyer named Rashid Ahmad Khan advised the man that unless he were to falsely claim that ‘his life was in danger back home’ he could not help him make his case for asylum.
A third lawyer by the name of Malik Nazar Hayat told the Mail’s reporter that the whole process would cost him £5,500 in cash and advised him that he had been paid £12,000 to £15,000 to handle similar cases.
The Mail says that it understands up to 40 legal firms are currently being “monitored” after suspicions were raised about identical asylum claim documents emerging from the same firms on behalf of different applicants.
Former UK Border Force head Tony Smith told the paper this practice was “big business” and called for tighter controls on asylum applications.
‘Coaching people to tell lies to gain an advantage in terms of an application they are making is quite wrong, because we should really be working on a basis of integrity from the lawyers,’ he said.
Alp Mehmet of Migration Watch said the practice, ‘undermines the legal system and discredits the asylum process. Such lawyers are a disgrace to their profession.’
Last year Ben Scallan reported figures from the European Border and Coast Guard Agency Frontex saying “there have been 86,000 illegal border crossings into the bloc detected since January of this year. This figure does not include individuals fleeing from Ukraine to the EU through border crossing points, and it represents 82% more illegal crossings than were seen during the same period,”
Dr. Matt Treacy also wrote on this platform saying, “The role of Frontex in combating the trafficking of illegal migrants has not surprisingly earned them the hatred and opposition of the NGO migrancy sector, as well as the political left. Some believe that this in large part explains the decision by the EU anti-fraud office OLAF to mount an investigation into Frontex that led to the resignation of its Executive Director Fabrice Leggeri in April 2022.”
Treacy’s full report can be read here.
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