'Suraya', Afghanistan

– the first Afghan woman to be granted asylum following the Refugee Appeals Board's change of policy
 

In the autumn of 2022, Italian lawyer Daria Sartori from The Rule 39 Initiative contacted Refugees Welcome and asked for our help regarding an elderly Afghan woman who had been in the Danish asylum system for almost 10 years. A few months earlier, she had been moved to the Kærshovedgård removals centre, even though she had an adult son living in Denmark who wanted her to live with him.
 
We began working closely with Daria, as well as the woman's son and her daughter who lived in the United States, to obtain the necessary documentation and prove that she was indeed a single woman with no male network. According to standard practice, this should have been grounds for asylum when she arrived in 2013, but it was believed that she had given ‘inconsistent’ explanations about her family. This claim was not supported by the interview transcripts in the case.

We worked on three strategies to help her: 1) put in a request to the Refugee Appeals Board to reopen her asylum case; 2) lodged a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights that the residence requirement at Kærshovedgård was in violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR); 3) lodged a complaint with the Danish Immigration Service requesting that she be immediately transferred to a nursing home near her son in the Copenhagen area.
 
The Refugee Appeals Board pre-empted us when, in December 2022, it decided to reopen all cases involving Afghan women and ease the burden of proof. Another change in practice shortly afterwards meant that asylum was given to all Afghan women, solely on the basis of their gender.
 
In early March 2023, Suraya (anonymised) thus became the first Afghan woman to be granted asylum under the new practice – after 10 years in the asylum system.