Egyptian Cultural Attache Says UKBA ‘Unresponsive’   The Egyptian government has threatened to shun the UK as a destination for postgraduate students on state scholarships because of frustrations over visas. Egyptian officials have said that they find the UK Border Agency to be unresponsive and have difficulty arranging visas for doctoral students’ dependants. Speaking at […]

UK refuses visa to Iran’s snooker world champion   The Secretary of State for the Home Department in Britain is preventing Hossein Vafaee, the current IBSF World Snooker Championship title-holder, from taking part in a key international tournament because he is Iranian. Hossein Vafaee Hossein Vafaee from Iran cruised to championship in the 2011 IBSF […]

PACE calls for further action to address the Syrian refugee crisis The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) has published Resolution 1902 (2012) on the European Response to the Humanitarian Crisis in Syria. The resolution affirms that the situation is becoming more and more critical every day, with 294,005 people already having sought refuge outside of the […]

UK government criticised for failing to protect the most vulnerable children A report published this week by the UK Commons Select Education Committee has criticised the level of protection afforded to the UK’s most vulnerable children. The sections of the report dealing with trafficked children and refugee and asylum seeking children are where some of the strongest criticism emerges. […]

UKBA Asylum Backlog Cases Out of Control The number of outstanding immigration and asylum cases rose by 25,000 in three months and is “spiralling out of control”, making the total caseload the equivalent of the population of Iceland, said Keith Vaz, Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, today. More than 300,000 cases needed to be […]