November 08-2013
Britain says it accepted 52 Mojahedin-e Khalq members from Camp Hurriya in Iran, then booted them out, but may now accept some of them back in.
Britain has been closed-mouth about this, and there were no details.
The only information came in a brief written exchange in the House of Commons.
A member of parliament, Sir Menzies Campbell, asked for a report on the status of 52 Mojahedin members “who are seeking resettlement in the UK.”
Mark Harper, who is the minister of immigration, submitted a bare bones, two-sentence response. It said, in full:
“None of the 52 residents of Camp Ashraf and Camp Liberty [Hurriya] who were previously settled in the UK have any current immigration status here. We have agreed to consider, exceptionally, their re-admission as refugees, subject to a [sic] UN High Commissioner for Refugees.”
Harper didn’t say why the 52 were originally accepted and allowed into the UK.
He did not say why they were expelled or where they were sent.
The response published in the daily Hansard by the House of Commons had a footnote indicating that Britain wanted an assessment from the UN High Commissioner clearing each of the 52 individually and ruling that none had been “complicit in acts of terrorism, or other activities incompatible with refugee status.” The footnote said such assessments had been submitted for 17 of the 52, but that the Immigration Ministry had reached no decision on whether to allow any of them back into Britain.
The whole point of bringing the Mojahedin members to Camp Hurriya was for the UN High Commissioner to hold interviews and write assessments on each Mojahedin member before giving them refugee status and making them eligible to move elsewhere.
The implication was that something went wrong and all 52 were sent to the UK without ever having been cleared by the UN High Commissioner, as required.