The United Kingdom's government has turned down the application of a Syrian asylum-seeker, who fled Syria due to forcible conscription of the Bashar Assad regime in 2017.
Guardian reported that the decision, which is thought to be the first case of its kind, was sent to the Syrian by the Home Office in December.
“I am not satisfied to a reasonable degree of likelihood that you have a well-founded fear of persecution,” the letter said.
Though no other European country is forcibly sending refugees back to Syria as it is a conflict zone, Denmark has been detaining some refugees who refuse to return to their home country voluntarily amid protests by human rights organizations.
While the Assad regime claims that Syria’s doors are open for the safe return of refugees, human rights reports point to the opposite, underlining that returning Syrians face detention, torture and abuses by the regime.
In a report published last year, Amnesty International said that many Syrian refugees who returned home have been subjected to detention, disappearance and torture at the hands of Syrian security forces, proving that it still is not safe to return to any part of the country.
In the report entitled “You’re going to your death,” the rights group documented what it said were violations committed by Syrian intelligence officers against 66 returnees, including 13 children between mid-2017 and the spring of 2021. Among those were five cases in which detainees had died in custody after returning to the country ravaged by civil war, while the fate of 17 forcibly disappeared people remains unknown.
