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Published : 17 May 2024, 07:35 PM
Bangladesh has agreed under a post-Brexit deal to take back its citizens who are living in the UK without valid documents.
The two countries signed a Standard Operating Procedures or SOPs on the matter in their first ever Joint Working Group meeting on home affairs in London on Thursday.
British Minister for Countering Illegal Migration James Tomlinson-Mynors, and Bangladesh High Commissioner in the UK Saida Muna Tasneem witnessed the signing, the high commission said in a statement on Friday.
Tasneem said the high commission in collaboration with the UK Home Office has been returning certain numbers of undocumented Bangladeshis for more than a decade.
That is why the number of undocumented Bangladeshis in the UK is minimal at this moment she said and added that Bangladesh’s home ministry will work closely with the British Home Office with support from the high commission on the matter.
“The good news is that Bangladesh is not even within the top 10 countries in terms of numbers of undocumented foreign nationals, and yet we needed to formalise this MoU with the post-Brexit UK,” she was quoted as saying in the statement.
The Bangladesh-UK SOPs on Returns is a successor to the Bangladesh-European Union SOPs of 2017, the procedure that used to be followed before UK’s exit from the EU for returning Bangladeshi overstayers from the UK.
British daily The Telegraph reported that the deal is a fast-track returns agreement for the deportation of failed asylum seekers.
Such Bangladeshis have become “one of the biggest nationalities abusing the visa system”, the newspaper said.
Nearly 11,000 Bangladeshis entered Britain on visas last year only to lodge asylum claims within 12 months in an attempt to stay permanently, according to the report.
The migrants came on international student, worker or visitor visas in the year to March last year in an attempt to exploit a “back door” to Britain by claiming asylum, The Telegraph said, adding that just 5 percent of Bangladeshis’ initial asylum claims are successful.
It quoted Tomlinson, the illegal migration minister, as saying: “Speeding up removals is a vital part of our plan to stop people coming or staying here illegally. Bangladesh is a valued partner and it is fantastic that we are bolstering our ties with them on this and a range of other issues.
“We have already seen clear evidence that these agreements have a significant impact on illegal migration. Global issues require global solutions and I look forward to working with Bangladesh and other partners to create a fairer system for all.”
Apart from signing of the SOPs, the Joint Working Group discussed opportunities of orderly migration including skilled and high talent migration from Bangladesh to the UK.
It opened avenues for discussion on mutual legal assistance, extradition, transnational crimes and countering terrorism and extremism, as well as capacity building of Bangladesh’s law-enforcing agencies, the high commission said.
Khairul Kabir Menon, additional home secretary for Security Services Division, and Bas Javid, director general of UK Home Office’s immigration enforcement, led the meeting.
