A MOTHER and daughter whose family life was torn apart by war are on their way to a reunion in Scotland after a nine-year separation.
Both women are frightened to be identified, so we have called the 53-year-old mother Samia, and her daughter Jalila, 38.
Jalila, a Syrian national, and her husband and child lived with her widowed mother in Syria, and after the ongoing civil war flared up in 2011 they fled to Lebanon. But Samia was unable to enter that country because she is a Palestinian national.
Her home was destroyed during the conflict and she has spent the past nine years living in refugee camps while her daughter had to cope with the death of her own husband, as well as separation from her mother.
Jalila was facing repatriation to a warzone, but had a stroke of luck when she was chosen for resettlement to the UK On arriving in Scotland, she sought help from lawyers to bring her mother here under the UK’s notoriously difficult family reunion regulations.
However, legal efforts were unsuccessful, until Glasgow immigration lawyer Usman Aslam took up the case.
Now the First Tier tribunal of the Immigration and Asylum Chamber has decided the mother and daughter can be reunited here.
“I honestly cannot describe how great a moment this is in my life – it is one of the greatest moments in my life,” Jalila told The National.
However, with her mother’s birthday just days ago, she added: “Honestly we don’t have any great days now in Syria, they are all sad days. I wish the days would run quickly until we get the visa, then mum can come over here so I can see her again, but the days are going very slowly just now.
“She is living in very bad, horrible conditions. She's living in a camp and it is not safe, because there is a lot of bombing and shooting there and even the hospitals are being destroyed, so the situation is unsafe and it’s been worse because of the pandemic.
“Here in Scotland we have to start another journey because the Home Office is moving very, very slowly to do what they have to do.”
Bureaucracy takes time in the family’s war-torn homeland, and it is not known how long Samia’s documentation will take to be processed.
However, Aslam, a senior solicitor at Rea Law in Glasgow, said he was thrilled the family would be reunited.
“It was only the brutal war in Syria that split them up, yet, despite this, the perverse family reunion rules do not allow for them to be reunited,” he said.
“I have made several calls to MPs to push to find a resolution here, as it is beyond clear that the immigration rules for this kind of scenario are not fit for purpose, and I do not intend to give up. The rules have been criticised, not only by the public or solicitors, but also judges from the highest courts.
“Priti Patel has tried to persuade the public about safe routes to come to the UK, yet there are systemic failures in decision making, which is costly to the public, and a heartbreak for families who have been torn apart by war, guns and bombs. Family reunion is a safe route to the UK, and is not a burden to the UK when compared with most other countries, so this is an area that requires urgent revising by the Secretary of State.”
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