The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, directly intervened to stop the deportation of an Iraqi Christian who fled Mosul when Islamic State (IS) fighters invaded the city.
Archbishop Welby said that he “strongly endorsed” the man’s second appeal to remain in Britain in a letter to the court.
When that appeal failed, the archbishop’s interfaith adviser, the Revd Mark Poulson, took up the man’s case last week with a letter supporting a third appeal.
The asylum seeker and his family fled their home in Mosul in the summer of 2014 when Islamic State seized control of the city and ordered all non-Sunni to leave, convert to Islam or be killed. The family were among the 100,000 who fled to Erbil in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan and were cared for by the Churches there. Archbishop Welby and Mr Poulson got to know the man when he worked as a volunteer at Lambeth Palace.
The archbishop wrote in his letter, dated 28 September: “He is someone who would be a great asset to the United Kingdom.”
Rejecting the second appeal, both judges argued that the appellant could safely rejoin his family in Erbil.
However, the man’s solicitor, Susan Liew, countered that such an argument was “erroneous, perverse and irrational” given that his family spent their first year there sheltering in a church basement.
Last week, Mr Poulson tried to persuade the Home Office to allow a third appeal. “We have been extremely impressed with his … willingness to spend time helping others whilst his own situation is so distressing,” he wrote in his letter.
The man told The Guardian: “I feel safe in Britain. I can’t go back to Kurdistan, it’s a different government, it’s not our country.” He said he spoke no Kurdish and his qualifications would not be recognised in Kurdistan. He added that no Christian could return to Mosul at present, because sympathy for the jihadis remained despite recent military victories against IS.
The Catholic crossbench peer Lord Alton confirmed that Christians are not safe in the region. “In many places fighting continues and those responsible for genocide and crimes against humanity are still to be captured and brought to justice.
“If we just want to see these people dead it would be simpler to issue death warrants rather than send refugees back into such peril and danger,” he said.
In November, Stephen Twigg MP, chairman of the International Development Committee, wrote to the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, urging the Home Office to grant asylum to non-Muslim Iraqis “in particular from the Yazidi and Christian communities” who had fled IS.
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