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International students who lost their right to live and study in the UK after being wrongly accused of cheating on an English language test sent a letter to Downing Street on Thursday, as part of an ongoing campaign to clean up their Names.
The 200 students are some of the 34,000 accused by the Interior Ministry of cheating on the English language tests they had to pass to obtain their visas. More than 1,000 students have been expelled from the UK as a result of the indictment, and many were arrested and detained by immigration agents, but a large number say they were wrongly accused.
“We were innocent, but our visas were denied or revoked and the government gave us no way to defend ourselves. Our futures were destroyed and we were allowed to fight a years-long legal battle that cost each of us tens of thousands of pounds, ”the letter says. “The Ministry of the Interior has stolen our future, calling us frauds and forcing us to wear a mark of shame for life. Many of us are destitute, we can barely survive or take care of our families, having spent everything we have trying to clear our names. Many of us suffer from severe stress and depression. Some of us have even tried to kill ourselves because we see no other way out. “
Undercover BBC footage six years ago revealed cheating had been made at two Home Office-approved testing centers, but activists say the Home Office was wrong to conclude that the vast majority of students who took the testing at dozens of other centers across the country had also cheated. .
Acting on the basis of evidence from the private company that provided the evidence, the Home Office concluded that 34,000 of the 58,458 students who had taken the test between 2011 and 2014 had definitely cheated, that another 22,600 had “questionable results” and that only 2,000 had definitely not cheated. Activists have questioned whether it is plausible that such a large proportion of students taking an exam approved by the Interior Ministry may have cheated.
Stephen Timms, a Labor MP from East Ham, who delivered the letter to Downing Street on behalf of the students, believes it is “unlikely” that more than 90% of those who took the Home Office exam were involved in cheating. Many of his constituents have been affected by the accusations. “Since then it has become quite clear that many of those students, probably most of them, were completely innocent of the charges that were brought against them,” he said. “They have been in limbo in the five or six years since then, they are not allowed to study, they are not allowed to work. Their money is gone, often their family’s life savings were invested in getting them a decent British education that has been completely lost. I am appalled at the terrible hardships inflicted on them by a false accusation that the British government simply accepted.
A report by the public accounts committee concluded last year that the “faulty” management of the Interior Ministry and the “rush to penalize” students caused “injustice and hardship for many thousands of international students.”
The Migrant Voice charity has been supporting many of the students during their long campaign for justice. Director Nazek Ramadan said: “There is a mountain of evidence that proves that they are victims of a huge injustice, and the government can no longer ignore this.”
Parallels have often been drawn between the Home Office’s treatment of these students and the department’s treatment of the Windrush generation. Former Home Secretary Sajid Javid promised to review the treatment of students in the wake of the Windrush scandal, but this commitment was subsequently dropped. Home Secretary Priti Patel’s commitment earlier this year to adopt the recommendations of an internal investigation into Windrush’s causes gave students reason to hope their cases could be viewed with more compassion. The Windrush investigation found that the Home Office was characterized by a “culture of disbelief and carelessness” and that there was a “lack of empathy for people,” and concluded that the department needed to introduce “systemic and cultural change.” However, the new permanent secretary of the Home Office, Matthew Rycroft, indicated last week his reluctance to revisit the issue.
“My heart goes out to the innocent people who got caught up in this,” Rycroft said at a public accounts committee hearing, but defended the department’s decision at the time to “take drastic action” in response to “systemic fraud.”
