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Refugee Week 2017 - Speaking Truth to Power: A Journalist’s Refusal to Be Silenced (19 June 2017)

Date: 19/06/2017
Duncan Lewis, Campaign Solicitors, Refugee Week 2017 - Speaking Truth to Power: A Journalist’s Refusal to Be Silenced

Joseph* had never before seen a dead body when, as a teenager, he saw his father’s decapitated corpse strewn amongst others on the street, a victim of intertribal violence. He can still remember the smell of blood, metallic and sweet in the close tropical air.

Of his family, only he and his mother survived, rescued by a member of the rival tribe who hid them in his house. This shelter came with a price. Joseph would lie awake at night, powerless, as this ‘protector’ raped his mother in the adjoining room.

When the killing finally stopped, Joseph and his mother returned to their home and he went back to school. Struggling with constant flashbacks of the massacre, he took longer than others to finish his secondary education. After graduating, Joseph went to work for the ‘only newspaper in the country that was not afraid to criticise the government and to report the truth’. He was proud to see his articles on sport and politics featuring in this popular and fearless newspaper.

He then started to receive phone calls in which he was accused of being an ‘enemy of the people’ and of betraying his country. Joseph’s paper came under increasing pressure, and was finally banned. Joseph and his colleagues were forced to flee the country.

A few days after arriving in his country of refuge, Joseph was kidnapped and detained at an unknown location by operatives from his home country. Hoping to obtain information on his journalistic sources, they tortured him mercilessly, both physically and psychologically. His tormentors took particular interest in his knees, kicking them in and lacerating them with knives. Another favoured technique was to place an implement under his toenail, lifting it from the bed, causing excruciating pain. They also deprived him of food and water, so he quickly became weak, emaciated and hopeless. On one occasion they placed a knife and a gun on a table in front of him, asking him to choose the instrument of his death: ‘There is no choice to make’, Joseph told them, ‘I’m already dead.’

After several months in this hell, the operatives forced him to sign a statement promising not to write any more political articles, before releasing him with the threat that if he reneged on this promise they would kill both him and his mother.

After he was released, Joseph went straight back to the family farm. As he approached home, skeletal and haunted, Joseph’s mother saw her son and burst into tears. He then stayed with his mother, trying to recover from his ordeal, but he could not ignore the call to write. So four years later Joseph was back in the city, carving out a successful niche in sports journalism. But this period of happiness and stability wasn’t to last.

Joseph soon discovered widespread corruption in sport involving the military and police football teams and he wasted no time in exposing it. When officials asked him to remove the article he refused, ‘because I had evidence to prove the story’.

So Joseph was once again a target for abuse. On three separate occasions when crossing borders he was detained and subjected to torture. He was punched, slapped, spat on, kicked and electrocuted. They accused him of passing information to exiles and they wanted to know the identity of his sources. On each occasion he was released when he proved that he was simply covering sports events.

Five years ago Joseph travelled to the UK to cover an international sports event. While here, he was informed by a friend at home that the security forces had come to his house. They were asking where he was and when he would come back.

The next thing Joseph knew, he was in a hospital in the north of England. His friend told him that he had had a panic attack and had been raving about committing suicide. The doctor charged with his care advised him to claim asylum.

So Joseph took this advice but, five years later, he is still fighting for his right to protection. Every single one of his journalist ex-colleagues have been granted asylum elsewhere (in the USA, Canada, Switzerland and Sweden) but the UK Home Office refuses to grant him asylum or to even allow him a fair chance to put forward his case in a Tribunal hearing. Despite being a victim of torture, and suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Joseph was locked-up for four months in notoriously miserable detention centres pending a final decision on his asylum claim, an experience which re-ignited violent memories of his previous detention and torture, causing a deterioration in his mental health.

Despite his suffering at the hands of the Home Office, Joseph holds no grudge against the UK or the British people. He lives with a British man who he says is ‘like my father’ and his neighbours are kind and friendly to him. He blames sections of the media for xenophobia in the UK: ‘they talk all things bad for asylum-seekers and refugees, that is why some people think we are bad.’ Joseph even feels sorry for the Home Office ‘caseowner’ who refused his case, having had the extremely rare opportunity to meet him in person:

"I went to where my caseowner who made the refuse on my asylum works, and, when I kept asking, he came down to meet me. I ask him “Why did you give me refuse?”. He told me the truth: “I’m so sorry, if I was the only one to make the decision then I would not have given refuse, but I had to because of the system.”

"I think the caseowners they have a hard job – they send someone back so they kill the life for someone –and they know they have kill someone. The system is just to reduce people, but there can’t be a number, it’s not about numbers, it’s about human rights".


*This is not his real name. He wanted to tell his story but he remains traumatised and is still waiting to be granted asylum. He wanted to remain anonymous and for us not to mention where he is from to avoid being identified.

Patrick Page, the author, joined Duncan Lewis as a caseworker in the Public Law department at Duncan Lewis' Harrow office. He specialises in immigration and asylum law and has been accredited as Level 2 Accredited Immigration caseworker.

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