Home Office ordered to pay £100,000 to asylum seeker whose life it ‘grossly restricted’

The Home Office must pay £100,000 to an asylum seeker who was unlawfully detained before her ability to work, buy food and socialise was “grossly restricted”, the high court has said.

After her student visa ran out in 2004, Nadra Tabasam Almas, of Leicester, made repeated attempts to stay in the UK, while complying with conditions placed on her as an overstayer.

But on reporting to an immigration centre in April 2018, Almas was handcuffed, told she was going to be flown back to Pakistan and detained at Yarl’s Wood removal centre for two weeks.

Almas sued the Home Office for unlawful detention and won, after it was concluded that it did not have good reason to believe she was likely to abscond at the time she was detained and had not followed correct procedures.

Almas told officials she feared for her safety as a Christian should she be returned to Pakistan, and did not want to be separated from her adult son, who had secured refugee status a few weeks before.

After release, Almas claimed asylum and was granted refugee status in 2021. But during the two years and nine months she waited for a decision, she was placed under conditions that she said “made her feel like a criminal” and breached her right to family life under the Human Rights Act.

Recorder McNeill, concluding she had been unlawfully detained, that the Home Office had taken an “unexplained” amount of time to decide on her case, and had not proved the conditions she was under during the delay were “lawful and proportionate”, ordered the Home Office to pay £98,757.04 in damages and costs of £30,000.

The Home Office appealed, arguing Almas’s detention had not been unlawful, that the procedural breaches – described as “lack of signatures on key forms” – were minor, that her damages were excessive, because there had not been an “abuse of power”, and that the recorder had been wrong to conclude there had been a “disproportionate breach” of rights.

But in a decision that affirms legal principles on the treatment of asylum seekers and visa overstayers in England and Wales, Mr Justice Ritchie, in a high court judgment at Birmingham made this week, dismissed the Home Office appeal.

In the original case, Recorder McNeill had concluded, when it came to the Home Office’s excuse for detaining Almas, that “it is not enough simply to assert that someone is likely to abscond just because their removal is imminent” and said there had been a reckless and unexplained “disregard for her rights”.

Ritchie added: “In my judgment, the recorder was correct … [Almas] could not claim state benefits and was restricted to the limited sums paid to asylum seekers. Her ability to work and earn was abolished. Her ability to socialise, buy food, eat out, build a social or religious life and all other aspects of her life grossly restricted. She was also prevented from travelling. She could not build her status in society or her self-respect.”