The United Kingdom has signed Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) with Bangladesh to facilitate the deportation of over 10,000 illegal Bangladeshi immigrants whose asylum applications have been rejected.
"Accelerating the removal process is a crucial part of our plan to prevent people from coming here and staying illegally. Bangladesh is a valuable partner of the UK, and it is excellent that we are strengthening our relationship with Bangladesh on this and other issues," said UK's Minister for Illegal Immigration Michael Tomlinson.
The agreement, reached during the first UK-Bangladesh Joint Home Affairs Working Group meeting held in London this week, includes fast-track procedures for deporting these individuals, according to a press release.
Last year, approximately 11,000 Bangladeshi nationals arrived in the UK on student, tourist, or work visas and subsequently applied for asylum. The UK immigration authorities rejected 95% of these applications.
These rejected asylum seekers will now be deported to Bangladesh under the new agreement.
Bangladesh High Commissioner to the UK, Muna Tasneem, highlighted the historical value-driven diplomatic relations between the two Commonwealth countries, rooted in the friendship between Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the UK's former Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath.
Reaffirming Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s zero-tolerance stance against irregular migration, she said Bangladesh High Commission London in collaboration with 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, and the Bangladesh Home Office would work closely with the British Home Office with support from the High Commission. The good news is that Bangladesh is not even within the top ten countries in terms of numbers of undocumented Bangladeshis, and yet we needed to formalize this MoU with the post-Brexit UK,” she said.
The Bangladesh-UK SOPs on Returns is a successor to the earlier signed Bangladesh-EU SOPs of 2017, the procedure that used to be followed before UK’s exit from the EU for returning Bangladeshi overstayers from the UK.
