Court quashes Home Office ban on Gaza family reunification

There are two families in Gaza: mothers and their children whose husbands, fathers and siblings wait for them in the United Kingdom. They have spent the months since October in a territory where the only British Visa Application Centre has shut its doors. The Fourth Geneva Convention, in its twenty-sixth article, obliges states to facilitate the reunion of families dispersed by war. The Convention on the Rights of the Child asks that a child’s application to join a parent be handled in a positive, humane and expeditious manner. Is either rule being followed? Until a court quashed the Home Office decision, the answer for these two families was plainly no.

My concern is not only that the Home Office refused. It is how it refused. The instrument was the Unsafe Journeys Policy, which exists to discourage applicants from risking dangerous crossings simply to reach a place where their fingerprints can be taken. On paper this is a protective rule, and I will not pretend otherwise. A government that waved families through the Rafah crossing towards a visa office in Cairo, knowing what that road holds, would carry part of the blame for whatever happened on it. A ministry has a duty not to create incentives for peril. That is the strongest case for the decision, and it deserves an answer rather than a sneer.

The answer is that a protective rule takes its meaning from the alternative it assumes exists. The policy presupposes a safer path that the applicant ought to take instead. When the British state’s own centre in Gaza closed, that path ceased to exist. What remained was a rule forbidding the dangerous journey, applied to people for whom staying put was the more dangerous course. At Solferino we did not post notices instructing the wounded to come to the dressing station and then fold up the tents. A rule that tells a mother not to make the journey, while the institution that would have spared her the journey has been withdrawn, does not protect her. It parks her under the bombardment and calls this caution.

Think of what the paperwork looks like from the inside. A woman in a damaged flat holds a folder containing birth certificates, a marriage record, perhaps a letter from a solicitor in Birmingham or Glasgow, and her children’s photographs cut to the regulation size. Every document the system asks for, she has. The one thing it demands that she cannot supply is her body, presented at a counter that no longer exists in her territory. The refusal letter does not say the family is ineligible. It says, in effect, that the family is in the wrong place to be eligible, and that the state regrets it will not help them leave it.

I do not argue that the Home Office acted from cruelty. Departments act from procedure, and procedure is written for normal conditions. The failure is institutional, and so is the remedy. Biometric enrolment can be deferred until arrival, as it has been for other populations in other emergencies. Identity can be verified through documents and through the sponsoring relatives who are already in the country and already known to the authorities. The ministry has the discretion. The court has now reminded it that discretion is an obligation to think, not permission to stop thinking.

Here is where satisfaction would be premature. A judicial review protects the claimants before the court. It does not protect the family next door that lacked a lawyer, or the one whose sponsor could not afford the fees, or the one that has not heard of the ruling at all. Accountability that must be won one case at a time is accountability rationed by access to counsel. Humanitarian law was never meant to work this way. Its purpose is to establish a standard that institutions meet without being sued into meeting it.

What the rules require is clear enough. Families separated by war must be helped to reunite where reunion is possible, and children’s applications must be decided with speed and humanity. What the institutions could provide is a functioning route: deferred biometrics, remote verification, a published process rather than a series of individual refusals overturned on appeal. What remains unmet is everything beyond these two families.

Somewhere in Gaza tonight a mother is checking that the birth certificates are still dry.