Typical client meeting, no?
The SRA has vowed to clamp down on law firms which help migrants fraudulently settle in the UK by pretending to be gay.
This week the BBC reported on several law firms it caught concocting fake scenarios to help migrants beat Home Office checks.
The UK offers asylum to people who would be persecuted in their home countries for being gay if they returned, and the BBC’s undercover reporters uncovered a thriving legal pipeline in which fake asylum seekers from Pakistan and Bangladesh, where homosexuality is illegal, were advised to pretend to be gay to stay.
An approach to Mazedul Hasan Shakil, a paralegal at Law & Justice Solicitors, resulted in meetings with a woman called ‘Tanisa’ who advised that "There is no check-up to find out if the person is a gay", and that "The main thing is what you say. You just have to tell them that 'I am a gay and it is my reality'".
For £2,500, she offered to arrange an application buttressed by references from the Worcester LGBT group for gay asylum seekers, where she is an adviser and Shakil is the founder and chair.
A visit from the Beeb cast doubt on the group’s legitimacy. "Nobody is a gay here. Not even 1% are gay. Not even 0.01% are gay", one Worcester LGBT member told the BBC’s undercover reporter.
Asked by the reporter how he could bring his wife from Pakistan if he had declared that he was gay, Tanisa explained, "Once she's here, we can make her a lesbian".
Law & Justice Solicitors told the BBC that Tanisa had no professional connection to the firm and that it was investigating "any potential unauthorised access" to its London office.
Aqeel Abbasi, a senior legal adviser at Gray’s Inn-based Connaught Law, also offered to make a fake claim on the undercover reporter’s behalf. He said his price was £7k, and included taking pictures of the man in a gay club. Abbasi told the reporter he would need to find a pretend boyfriend to help his application.
Connaught Law told the BBC it had suspended Abbasi's contract while it conducted an internal investigation and that it had reported the matter to the SRA, while Abbasi denied dishonesty and malpractice.
Jonathan Peddie, the SRA’s (busy) Executive Director of Investigations, Enforcement and Litigation, has said the regulator will seek to stamp out the misconduct. He told RollOnFriday, "All regulated law firms and solicitors should uphold the high professional standards that we and the public expect of them. This is especially important in areas such as asylum and immigration, where the people involved may be vulnerable”.
“We are urgently following up with the SRA-regulated firms identified in the BBC story", he said. "If we find evidence that anyone we regulate has acted in ways that contravene their duty to act legally and uphold the law, we will take action."
Comments
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chuckle
Absolutely nothing will be done.
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These people who are either Solicitors or the insidious “Immigration Advisers” and “fixers” need themselves be arrested, charged and convicted and then be deported to Pakistan and Bangladesh and see how the Law here should operate and not be “gamed” for money by people like them. Any Solicitors, or any people working for accredited and regulated Law Firms, found guilty should be struck off or be banned for life.
This means that people who truly identify as being LGBTQI+ and actually face persecution and death in these, and also in many Gulf (including UAE, KSA, Bahrain, Qatar, Iran, Iraq, etc.) and Arab States and a number of African Countries too, for whom these protections were rightly introduced will face persecution and significant and intense pressure and degrading questioning and fear in this Country from Immigration Officials and the “Great Unwashed” and vigilantes.
Quite abhorrent and appalling.
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It won't get any traction. We all know this has been going on for years. See also:
- dodgy conversions to Christianity
- adults pretending to be children
- sham marriages
- the more academic attempts to bend the immigration rules with novel interpretations of human rights laws.
The only interesting thing about this story is that the BBC are leading with it, which is most unlike them. It's like the Guardian doing a deep dive into the prevalence of welfare fraud, or the Telegraph coming out against the pensions triple lock.
File under: Too Difficult, Politically Uncomfortable, Don't Rock The Boat, Trebles All Round For Immigration Lawyers and Judges.
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The SRA is beyond useless.
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The answer is simple, ban all asylum and immigration claims from applicants that originate from these countries.
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As someone else said below the interesting thing is that the woke left BBC has actually felt able to do this - uncover illegality which of course is very good. I would just change English law so that being gay, Christian etc is not counted even if that means some gay people then do suffer. We cannot have everyone here. There woudl be some sad cases where someone might need to be as celibate as a Catholic priest but it would not kill them to be so.
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Wait! Stop!
This can't be right! Why is the BBC engaging in "attacks on lawyers" doesn't it know that this "fatally undermines the Rule Of Law"?!
These lawyers have an obligation to just do the very best job that they can for their clients and if that's getting results the public don't like then the only thing to blame is the system*!
At least, that's what the wailing progressive cognoscenti of the RoF threads told me in every thread about immigration lawyers behaving badly in which I (and others) suggested that this kind of visa fraud was rife and that the whole sector was operating as a production line for bogus immigration applications.
I just wish that RoF could do a Review Of The Year style piece in which it goes back through the last few years of those threads and give us a digest of some of the shrillest wailing by commenters that Immigration Lawyers were above reproach and that anyone daring to criticise them was somehow pulling down the whole legal system** and must be a Russian Bot paid by the Kremlin.
Kicking bullshit like this under the carpet and hoping that the public will just tolerate it in perpetuity is how you end up getting a Reform government. We mustn't settle for the British compromise of politely looking away, hoping that the problem will eventually solve itself, and vaguely mumbling that it's all the fault of the nasty Tories and anyway human rights are terribly important and it's all very difficult and nuanced to fix so gosh let's have a committee and a report of some kind.
If someone sensible doesn't fix it (and I mean actually fix it, not make a wordy statement and a twiddle around the edges) and fix it fast then we will end up with Farage/Farage-replacement in Number Ten. You don't have to like that for it to be true.
*Obvs when government does try to change the system we'll bring several dozen human rights challenges to block it insisting that the government has no right to change anything at all, ever, and that the 1950 convention actually created a human right to free visas for all.
**Ironic, given that the wholesale abuse of the visa system has done more to undermine public trust and confidence in it, and government more broadly, than any Daily Mail headline has ever managed.
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Honestly, there is a fairly simple fix to this.
If there was an annual cap on total asylum claims that the UK was willing to grant then this problem would become a near irrelevance overnight. Run it at 5,000 for the first few years then reconsider and revise after the next election.
The general public of the UK would relax, because the prospect of a maximum of 5,000 piss takers a year would be a huge reduction. Progressives wouldn't have to compromise on values / quality of process / human rights / multiple appeals, because we could keep that for all of the applications we accepted. The money would fall out of the visa-fraud industry because volume would fall away.
The problem is that we don't have a ceiling on this stuff.
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Genuinely impressed with the BBC. I can imagine the floods of internal angst that will be going on around this issue: but the facts speak for themselves. I speak as someone whose complaint on BBC disinformation regarding the Gaza mass graves dug by Hamas was included in the Prescott report.(they still haven't responded to the complaint or to this aspect of Prescott: it's been well over a year from the former).
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Well done the beeb. Look forward to seeing the diversity-is-everything SRA going after all the firms faking it (and on which they've probably heaped praise in the past)
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> The answer is simple, ban all asylum and immigration claims from applicants that originate from these countries.
Found the Reform voter.
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As many have commented, this is hardly news in itself - this has been the stock-in-trade of criminals posing as solicitors all the time I’ve been in the profession. More interesting is what possessed anyone at the BBC to set out the story. I think they fear the British people have lost patience with an establishment that tells them black is white and expects them to swallow it - endlessly.
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"Found the Reform voter."
... and you'll find hundreds of thousands more for just as long as the UK's established/mainstream parties refuse to countenance 'cut off source of problem' as a solution, and continue to prefer 'pretend problem does not exist and that even if it did UK has moral obligation to continue allowing problem to occur'.
It genuinely baffles me that the UK's upper-middle classes can't get their head around this idea that the public are going to vote for parties that promise to fix the issue and not for parties that try to pretend that the issue doesn't exist or that the UK government is powerless to do anything about it.
I don't like Nigel Farage any more than you do, but if you keep telling the public that there's no problem and that even if there was the European Convention on Human Rights prevents us from doing anything about it, then they'll vote for whoever says that they see the problem very clearly and are quite happy to tear up the Convention if that's the obstacle to fixing it. Right now, that's Nigel.
Then, when they do, everyone in the home-counties will look around in total bafflement and wonder how it could possibly have happened.
Just like Brexit, everyone who is so sure that they're brilliantly educated and terribly well informed about politics will be astounded and will spend years agonising over how the electorate could possibly have got it so badly wrong. "Perhaps the Russains brainwashed them all? Yes, that must be it! The Russians are responsible! Russians stole the election!" they'll say to one another over drinks.
Anything, absolutely anything, other than acknowledging the fact that the electorate probably just voted for people offering to fix the things that bothered them, and not for people trying to pretend that the source of bother didn't exist (and even if it did the country had no choice but to keep taking the pain in order to honour international treaties that the electorate never voted for).
Some of the very smart ones will tell each other that offering to fix things that bother British people and prioritising that over international treaties is 'Populism' that mustn't be countenanced; because it's a threat to democracy to let the electorate have votes about stuff from treaties that were decided by their betters some seventy years ago.
Then they'll say that the unwashed commoners are the stupid ones.
TLDR: British progressives are mental, they say they don't want a Reform government, then behave in a way that pumps the accelerator towards getting one.
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You’ll find millions.