LONDON – Britain should practice what it preaches to African countries by doubling the number of vulnerable refugees it hosts and reviewing policies that restrict an asylum seeker’s right to work, lawmakers said on Tuesday.
A cross-party committee said the British government should “lead by example” by resettling and employing refugees, especially those forcibly uprooted from their homes in sub-Saharan Africa.
“It is so important that the UK behaves at home as it is asking some of the world’s poorest nations to do,” said Stephen Twigg, chairman of the International Development Committee, which scrutinizes Britain’s foreign aid department.
“We should not be asking nations to house and employ refugees when the numbers we take in are so small, and the employment freedoms limited,” he said in a statement.
The committee said Britain resettled 5,756 refugees in 2017/18, but only about 450 were from sub-Saharan Africa – a region where conflict uprooted 15,000 people every day in 2017, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center.
It said the country’s intake of the most vulnerable refugees should increase to 10,000 per year, with a quarter of those spaces reserved for sub-Saharan Africa.
“We are strongly committed to supporting refugees and UK leadership has helped drive longer-term ways of working that mean refugees can access education, find work and become more self-reliant, while also benefiting host communities,” a spokesman from Britain’s Department for International Development said in a statement.
Over a third of the world’s forcibly displaced people are in Africa, including some 6.3 million refugees and 14.5 million who have been forced from their homes within their own country’s borders, according to the African Union. (Reuters)
