I’ve just read
on-line last week’s joint All-Parliamentary Groups report Visa Problems for
African Visitors to the UK.
African applicants
are twice as likely to be refused as those from other parts of the world.
Some of the
individual case studies make me cry.
Mauritarian applicants
cannot apply from their own country so have to get a visa to travel to Morocco so
that they can apply from there – something only those with particular levels of
financial and time resources can contemplate doing.
The London International
Festival of Theatre was asked why it was not recruiting UK dancers when it
applied on behalf of Congolese dancers explicitly invited to share their experience
of Civil War.
Some of those
invited by the Government’s own Department for International Development have
been refused or approval has delayed so long as to make attendance at the
relevant events impossible.
The rolling
out of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s world leading work
on preventing Ebola epidemics has been thwarted by a refusal to allow emerging
local medical researchers to visit the UK.
I was blissfully
unaware of all this when walking in the western end of the parish the day after
the report was published.
No comments:
Post a Comment