MAVIS is among the Zimbabwean asylum-seekers on hunger strike at removal centres around Britain fighting their deportation. While the Home Secretary has refused to grant a general moratorium on sending failed asylum-seekers home, he has promised to review individual cases.

“I am totally confused about what’s going to happen,” admits the 35-year-old woman from Harare, who did not want her real name to be used for fear of what might happen to her if she has to return. She has been in Yarl’s Wood removal centre since mid-December. “I’ve read the newspapers and I’ve read they were going to cancel removals, but who knows?”

Mavis has been given a date for her deporation later this month. What would it mean to be returned to Zimbabwe? “It’s just putting me straight back into the lion’s den,” she says. “When I came here I was fleeing the Mugabe regime and when I go back there they will be waiting.” Mavis has so far managed to avoid deportation after the intervention of John Austin, the Labour MP for Erith and Thamesmead.

Mavis has good reason to be fearful. Her father was beaten to death by supporters of Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party in March 2000. She claims that he was targeted because he managed the property of a white farmer outside Harare. Later that year she left for the UK. Her family are well-known supporters of the Movement for Democratic Change, the opposition party, and her brother was also murdered in June 2003 by Zanu-PF thugs.

Mavis has been told by the Home Office that she has exhausted all routes of appeal. She has paid £2,500 to two legal advisers for advice. “But the only paperwork I ever received from them is the refusal from the Home Office,” she says.

Sarah Harland, of the Zimbabwe Association, which represents the interests of exiles in the UK, reports that finding diligent lawyers to provide quality legal advice for those appealing asylum refusals is a huge hurdle. “Often the best that we can do is to talk to someone and tell them what to expect, perhaps encourage them to go to the court beforehand and see how it works,” she says. “It is ridiculous that the Legal Services Commission (LSC) is making decisions about whether firms should get funding or not to proceed with a case. They’re making that decision before anyone even gets to court. It’s a form of discrimination against the poor.”

Alan Brooks, a paralegal who specialised in immigration work before retiring in November 2003, is working one day a week with the association. “More and more people who have come to us in the past five or six months have been abandoned (by lawyers), most typically after the initial appeal hearing,” he reports. “Sometimes the legal representatives say that they can’t go any further and other times they have made an attempt to secure funding and have been blocked.” What are the prospects without the help of lawyers? “Virtually nil,” he reckons. But he adds that many of the decisions taken “are poor and seriously open to question”. According to the Refugee Council, while nine out of ten asylum applications are initially refused, some 20 per cent of those cases that go to appeal are successful.

Harland believes that there are 120 Zimbabweans in detention centres and she says “since November probably about 130 to 140 have been removed to Zimbabwe, South Africa and Malawi”. Until November there was a ban on deportations to Zimbabwe for two years. Most of the calls to the Zimbabwe Association are from asylum-seekers outside London. “In Birmingham I don’t think there are any reputable firms left doing legal aid; there may be one or two in Liverpool and a couple in Leeds,” she says.

The charity Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID) was last week calling on detainees to exercise their right to challenge their detention by making a bail application. They wrote to Charles Clarke calling for the immediate release of those Zimbabwean nationals who are in “legal limbo”. With the Prime Minister refusing to officially suspend removals and the press reporting an unofficial halt, they argue that with no transparent policy on removals detention is arbitrary and “ arguably unlawful”. Zoe Stevens, the project manager, believes that most detainees do not have access to legal help.

Immigration lawyers have long been the favourite bogeymen in parts of the media — portrayed either as shadowy figures “touting for work” at the dockside or as “asylum fat-cat millionaires”. That caricature is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the reality of the exodus from publicly funded asylum work by immigration teams at well-known practices such as Winstanley Burgess and Coker Vis in London. Good-quality advisers are “deserting asylum legal aid work because of the uncertainty surrounding appeal rights and low rates of pay”, says Janet Paraskeva, chief executive of the Law Society. “We are not surprised to learn that asylum-seekers from Zimbabwe are experiencing difficulties finding a legal aid adviser.”

However, the LSC says that there are 256 providers in London, 33 in Birmingham, 18 in Leeds and five in Liverpool. “In 2004-05 the LSC granted almost 80 per cent of the applications it received for funding for representation at appeals and more than 90 per cent of applications to extend funding beyond the initial threshold,” a spokesman said. According to one lawyer, with close connections to the Zimbabwean community, their efforts are “stifled” by funding problems. “We end up doing the work pro bono for most of our clients who are refused legal aid because we believe they have a good chance on appeal,” she says. “We can’t just let people wallow in detention centres or go to the courts on their own.”

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