Displaying items by tag: refugee

Rev Brian Casey is making a fresh appeal to the Home Office not to deport 13 year old Giorgi Kakava, who has lived in Scotland since he was three. He faces being sent to Georgia, where he was born. He came to the UK with his asylum-seeker mother, who feared the gangsters her husband owed money to would either kill Giorgi or sell him to sex traffickers. She died in 2018 while awaiting the outcome of her asylum appeal, leaving Giorgi in the care of his grandmother and legal guardian Ketino Baikhadze. His residence permit expired in December. 90,000+ people signed a petition asking that he be allowed to stay in Glasgow. Rev Casey said it was a ‘scandal and a moral outrage’ that he was still living under a cloud of uncertainty. His plea for ‘decency and compassion’ comes as the Scottish parliament prepares to vote on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on 23 March.

In the wake of the closure of the Dubs scheme (see article 1 in the Europe section) allowing unaccompanied minors from Calais into the UK, the Government has come under fire. Lord Dubs (himself a refugee from Nazism), who introduced the scheme, is outraged at its closure. The Archbishop of Canterbury was ‘shocked’ over the decision and asked the Government to reconsider. Home Secretary Amber Rudd said the French authorities did not want the scheme to continue because it encourages people-traffickers. Deut.10:18,19 says, ‘He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. You are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt’. Also Job 31:32 says, ‘No stranger had to spend the night in the street, for my door was always open to the traveller.’