Refugees + law = education?
Sometimes, the most banal administrative classification can change someone’s life forever.
A tick in a box — international student — can mean the difference between an education for a young, talented person, and a crisis of existential proportions.
Take Nigar, a young woman from Azerbaijan. She has lived in the UK for seven years, after fleeing war crimes in her native country. She won various education awards as a teenage student in Manchester. She’s now a 19-year-old undergraduate at Kent University. She is reading for a degree in drama (“I chose to study drama”, she wrote to us, because it “reward[s] us with a creative outlook on the world around us”), and speaking to her you’d be hard pressed to distinguish her from any other articulate English undergraduate with a bee in their bonnet.
But she’s not just another undergraduate — she escaped war crimes as a twelve year old, and made a new life in the UK where she’s found a home. And the bee in her bonnet could be the difference between receiving a higher education or not.
When she wrote to CrowdJustice to crowdfund her case, she explained that even after extensive negotiations with Kent University, it has refused to classify her as a “home student”. As an international student, the tuition fees are so high that she is likely to have to drop out. But, she says:
I want to get a degree so I can get a great job and be a benefit to this country and make everyone around me proud. Everyone is able to study, but not me. All my hard work is basically going to waste as in my first year of university I earned a 2:1!
A Supreme Court case earlier last year, Tigere ([2015] UKSC 57), found, in an analogous situation, that an exclusion for eligibility for student loans based on a person’s immigration status was unjustifiable discrimination linked to national origin, contrary to Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Lady Justice Hale said that the harm caused to the individuals concerned, and the community as a whole, could not be outweighed by the administrative benefits of a rigid rule preventing access to student loans for non-settled immigrants.
Nigar’s case is not the first, and — in this time of momentous refugee crisis — nor will it be the last, to battle for the rights of an education irrespective of where you are from. She may, however, be one of the few individuals who has the courage (if not the funds!) to take her case to court.
Have a legal case that could benefit from crowdfunding?
