Afghan Women and Girls

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Tuesday 6th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

I thank the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) and the Backbench Business Committee for granting this important debate.

Women and girls in Afghanistan are being forcibly disappeared from public life by the Taliban. That much is absolutely clear. It is deliberate and it is tragic. I want to reflect briefly on the commitments that the UK Government made to women and girls in Afghanistan. They built women and girls up, they gave them access to education, and then they brutally took that away when Afghanistan fell and have left them in that situation.

I remember very clearly the phone calls that I got from many constituents who had family in Afghanistan in August 2021. My office was inundated by calls from desperate families who were terrified for their relatives. I am fairly sure that most of them are still stuck in Afghanistan, or perhaps in Pakistan or somewhere else; they have not got to the UK. There were, I believe, over 80 cases, but I am aware of only a couple who managed to get family to safety in the UK.

A lot of that has to do with the petty and small bureaucracy of the Home Office, because disproportionately it was husbands who were here and had wives or families in Afghanistan that they could not get over because of earnings thresholds. They had made applications or they were waiting to earn enough to bring their family over, but they could not bring them over, because that paperwork was not in place.

The very nature of the immigration system makes people unsafe. Many of my constituents who were in touch had applications that were in process but could not be completed after the UK pulled out, because the families could not get to Islamabad to complete the paperwork. I had a constituent who waited a further six months, with the Taliban knocking on his wife’s door, for UK Visas and Immigration to get round to processing her appeal and issuing documents, despite chasing by my office. I had a constituent whose elderly mother was on her own in Kabul and being asked to complete a tuberculosis test to come over.

Others had English language tests as a barrier. I had a case of a husband and father whose children and wife in Afghanistan were refused access to the Baron hotel because he could not be there to vouch for them. As far as I know, they are there. There are now many families stuck in Pakistan. The Independent reported in April that about 1,000 families, including 500 children, are stuck in limbo in Pakistan. They could be here with their families, but because of that petty bureaucracy, they are not.

I ask the Minister for further clarification on what has happened to expressions of interest in the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme, because I know of one made back in August 2022. In the letter that I got from Lord Murray in April, the Home Office said that it was unable to provide a timescale but would notify the constituent of the outcome as soon as possible. I am not aware of any progress on that. How many people’s cases are still pending in that scheme, and when will they be able to get to safety in the UK and come to their family? Ideally, we would want the Taliban gone. Ideally, we would want women to have a safe and prosperous life with their children in Afghanistan, and a future. That future has been stolen from them. In the meantime, we need safe and legal routes so that they can come to safety here.

[Several hon. Members rose—]