The Network has long established a record of mobilising scrutiny on the operational level performance of the UK immigration services performance on LGBT & LGBTQ+ safety, equality, and human rights. This has included representations to the Home Office, UKVI, the Immigration Tribunal, and in some cases LGBT organisations with interests in this area, as well as to the NHS England LGBT engagement group.
In particular though our extensive experience and expertise in this area — where we are seeking transparency and accountability at the Home Office and Tribunal, with goal of comprehensive change of culture and practice — we have over recent years had a number of submissions to major relevant Parliamentary Select Committee inquiries.
However, the most recent of these by the highly important and influential House of Commons Women & Equalities Select Committee (Womeq) has been the most significant of all as it has centred on Protected Characteristic Communities (de-facto LGBT in this case) Equality and the UK Immigration system: please see https://lgbtnetwork4change.com/lgbt-network-for-change-provides-submission-to-historically-important-parliamentary-inquiry-into-home-office-immigration-diverse-communities/
We included for example in our evidence about our recent and ongoing work with our LGBT & LGBTQ+ Ugandan community’ in Uganda, and the issues relating to UK Government (FCDO) performance, impacted by the Home Office UK Immigration record on LGBT human rights, and also some concerns on LGBT refugee and asylum applicants category omission from the Census 2021 questions, as well as major themes of concern on very senior Home Office officials treatment of LGBT cases.
Out of about 25+ published submissions only about five were directly from dedicated LGBT organisations (some better known names being absent altogether), with the Network’s evidence being one of these. In addition, one of the other five published submissions came from Bournemouth University: with the Network lead, Alan Mercel-Sanca involved in contributing his/the Network’s knowledge and expertise in this field to help guide and input on an LGBT refugees & asylum seekers and UK immigration research and working group creation; without which the latter would have been all but impossible.
The published paper by the Network will therefore be helping the Select Committee to inform effective scrutiny of UK government officials performance in this area (and indeed more broadly, including better awareness of the Immigration Tribunal dimension), as we have long sought, and contributing to better transparency on that performance at detailed level that will progressively influence for meaningful change.
You can read the Network submission at: https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/328/women-and-equalities-committee/publications/written-evidence/?page=5