News

We are deeply saddened to hear that our client Ms Kelemua Mulat, an Ethiopian asylum seeker who was denied potentially life-saving cancer treatment by the Home Office, has died aged 39.

She suffered unnecessarily as the result of a flawed policy on charging overseas visitors for NHS care. This policy on NHS Charges and the accompanying Regulations seek to make hospital staff act as immigration officers, a job for which they are ill-prepared and ill-suited.

Kelemua’s crucial treatment for her advanced stage breast cancer had been delayed due to an error in the application of the NHS Charging regime by the treating hospital. The NHS Charging regime is one of the pillars in the government’s wider hostile environment policy which forces the NHS to impose upfront charges on migrants who are deemed ineligible for free healthcare.

Kelemua should have been exempt from being charged for her treatment, yet despite her illness and vulnerability, she was forced to fight a legal battle to both secure the treatment she needed and to have a bill cancelled that may have affected any future applications for leave.

After the Home Office decided that she was ineligible for free health care, she was subsequently refused chemotherapy treatment for around six weeks. Her condition worsened significantly in recent weeks and she was moved from a hospice in Salford where she died on 8th September 2019.

Mother of one, Kelemua fled Ethiopia and arrived in Britain in July 2015. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013 whilst in Greece. Her first asylum claim in Britain was rejected and her section 4 asylum support – which includes NHS healthcare – was temporarily stopped in February 2019 until 6 June 2018.

After our interventions, the hospital accepted that she was exempt from being charged under the NHS Charging regulations while her asylum claim was being considered, and that she was exempt from being charged for NHS care from the point at which her asylum support accommodation restarted. They also accepted that the treatment that she required was immediately necessary and urgent.

Kelemua’s lawyer Jeremy Bloom, a trainee solicitor in the public law department at our Harrow office comments on the situation;

“The NHS Charging regime is one of the mainstays of the wider hostile environment policy which is alive and kicking. Ms Mulat’s case shows the real and sickening human cost of this policy.

“Ms Mulat’s additional pain and suffering may have been avoided if the Home Office had provided accurate information to the hospital about her immigration status, or better yet, if hospitals were not compelled to carry out this discriminatory and unjust policy.”

We offer our deepest condolences to Kelemua’s family and friends at this difficult time.

Our public law department remains committed to challenging the unjust practices and policies of the Home Office that affect the most vulnerable in society.