Our History and What We Do

Bristol Refugee Rights was set up as a voluntary organisation in 2005
to uphold and champion the human rights of asylum seekers and
refugees. We provide a place of welcome in Bristol where asylum
seekers and refugees can meet and be supported to play a full part in
the life of the wider community and also campaign for the human
rights of refugees and asylum seekers. Bristol Refugee Rights aims to
deliver a ‘user-led’ service that addresses the practical, psychological
and human rights needs of refugees and asylum seekers by:

• Welcoming people into a safe place
• Empowering people to achieve an independent and productive life
• Enabling social inclusion
• Bringing public attention to human rights aspects of asylum law and
  practice based on information collected in the welcome centre.

Sue Njie

15th July 1951 – 15th July 2009

Bristol Refugee Rights and its Refugee Welcome Centre grew out of Sue Njie’s vision and determination.

It was Sue who, from 2000 onwards, saw the gap in provision for people newly arrived in Bristol, who seek asylum in UK, and set about organising for it to be filled.

She recognised the way isolation and exclusion affect asylum seekers in Britain. She understood the importance of a place where asylum seekers could come together, feel welcomed, and begin to find the support they so desperately needed. She knew, from many years community work experience, that to start things you have to take risks – have to be prepared to put yourself on the line. She took every opportunity that presented itself to speak about this need, to bring together a steering group, to attain wider recognition for the project, argue the case often in the face of scepticism and discouragement, to raise initial funds and to realise her dream. In April 2006 the doors opened, with a hot meal and a handful of volunteers.

Since then, the centre has grown enormously and gone through many changes – in name (from the imaginative but impossible to keep repeating Holding Refugees and Human Rights in Mind to the snappier Bristol Refugee Rights, in location (St Paul’s to Easton), in staff and volunteers, in users of the service, and in the Board of Trustees. It is now becoming recognised as a meeting point and real resource for new arrivals in Bristol. But it has remained firmly based in Sue’s initial vision – a place of welcome for asylum seekers and new refugees, where people from all over the world meet each other as human beings, and form a community that grows and works together.

Innovation of this kind requires more than dotting i’s and crossing t’s. It requires passionate commitment, insistence, clarity of purpose, and refusal to be diverted. Sue had all this. And as well she had a huge heart, and a capacity to meet and respond to everyone equally. Besides the strength to inspire and initiate, she noticed and responded to individual need. This is how she will be remembered by many dozens of people – for her generosity, wisdom born of experience, her straightforward kindness and her capacity to meet, appreciate and enjoy people on their own terms.

She has left a profound sense of loss but also a powerful legacy – in the flourishing voluntary community groups she worked so hard to establish, and also in personal gratitude from an astonishing number of people in every walk of life in Bristol, including many users of the Refugee Welcome Centre.

Our Values

The key values that underpin the work of Bristol Refugee Rights are
inclusion, partnership working, commitment to provision of a quality
service, empowerment and accountability. We work to sustain these
values both in the Welcome Centre and in our human rights
campaigning.

Through daily contact with people in the drop-in we have come to understand directly and in a very personal way the asylum process and its effect on people’s lives. Our experience accords with many of the findings of the four excellent reports of the Independent Asylum Commission, published in summer 2008.

Matters of particular concern to us:

• 1). 75% of asylum claimants are refused asylum here – they all face destitution. As we get to know people we understand how the asylum system lets down those who desperately need it.
• 2). The final tier of support – Section 4 – is available under certain conditions to those who would otherwise be destitute. This requires people to live on the shockingly low weekly sum of £35 – issued not in cash but in the form of supermarket gift cards.
• 3). Detention of children. Two young children in our ‘family’ at the Welcome centre were detained for 9 weeks between them over the past few months. This has given us some shocking first-hand information on the treatment of families in Yarl’s Wood removal centre.
• 4). We firmly support the IAC recommendation that anyone whose case has taken more than 6 months to determine, should have the right to work to maintain themselves. This should also apply to those who have been refused but not removed.

These concerns will form the basis of our campaigning work over the coming year.

Please sign our petition by going to the following site :-

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/dignitynotdestitution

Thousands of people fleeing conflict or persecution seek sanctuary in Britain. Three out of four of them are refused, but for various reasons it is impossible for them to return to their home country. They remain here, often for long periods of time, living in poverty, lacking adequate support from public services, and denied the right to support themselves by taking paid work.

Believing that such people deserve to be treated fairly, humanely and with dignity, we call on the Government to :-
- end the threat and use of destitution as a tool of Government policy against refused asylum seekers;
- provide all asylum-seekers with adequate financial support and access to public services, including health care and education;
- give such support in the form of cash, and end the use of supermarket gift cards;
- allow asylum-seekers, including those whose application has been refused, the right to work if, after six months in the asylum process, they have neither left the UK nor been given leave to remain.

Annual Report and Accounts - 2010/11

Our 2011 Annual General Meeting will be held on 18th October 2011. Here is our Annual Report and Accounts  for the year ending 31st March 2011 :-