A judge of the Superior Court of England and Wales on Tuesday has issued an emergency precautionary order for the Hotel The Bell, in the town of Epping, evicted before September 12 to the 138 asylum seekers that the British Ministry of the British Interior had located in its facilities. The decision has unleashed the alarm in the Labor Government of Keir Starmer, given the possibility that dozens of local authorities go to justice for the same purpose. More than 32,000 aspiring refugee statute inhabit 210 hotels throughout the United Kingdom. The accommodation policy, launched by previous conservative governments and inherited by the current executive, is a daily expense of almost seven million euros, and.
Ultra -right groups, neighbors and humanitarian organizations had been protesting for weeks, and facing each other, before The Bell. At some point, the Police arrested up to 16 protesters after bursts of violence occurred. One of the hotel residents was accused of abusing a minor last month.
The Epping Forest District Council, the local authority under whose mandate the hotel operates, resorted to a technical and legal argument to request the eviction of immigrants that has resulted, for the moment, effective. The council lawyers that the company that owns the business, Somani Hotels, never specified, in their original application for construction license, that its main activity was going to consist of hosting asylum applicants at the request of the Government. The urban planning legislation had been skipped, as admitted by Judge Stephen Eyre.
“This is an important decision for Epping Forest, but also for other councils throughout the country, and demonstrates that the government cannot happily skip the urban planning norms,” the President of the Epping Forest Council, the conservative Chris Whitbread, celebrated at the courts of the court.
Calls to manifest
As the famous condemnation of the gangster to Capone for a fiscal crime, the argument of urban planning seems to first sight a legal argument to obtain a judicial victory. But Judge Eyre’s precautionary order contains in his words a whole watchmaking bomb, because he admits that “the legal demonstrations” of the neighbors and of ultras groups against “the use of the hotel The Bell to accommodate asylum applicants” have caused “an important degree of disruption in the lives of the residents of the area.”
The decision is a stimulus for new acts of protest to arise throughout the country against hotels that host immigrants, with the intention of causing that same “disruption” and judicial orders of similar eviction. , has encouraged citizens to protest in front of the hotels where there are asylum applicants. “The community [de Epping] He knew how to get up and stand up with courage, even though they were insulted and described as ultra -right. In the end, he has managed to defeat, ”Farage proclaimed upon hearing the sentence. At least the 10 district councils that his party controls today, Reforma UK, have announced their intention to follow the path of the EPPING Forest Council and go to court.
Not only Farage wanted to get revenue from the court order. The leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, has encouraged all local councils governed by their formation to follow the Epping Forest wake and go to court, if they have in their jurisdiction with a hotel destined for asylum applicants. A whole exercise of hypocrisy by the toriesunder whose mandate the use of these establishments began, which became more than four hundred.
The Starmer government has pledged to end a irregular immigrants housing system that is a continuous source of tension, but it is difficult to empty hotels if there is not previously an alternative of accommodation. The Ministry of Interior would fall into irrigation to violate humanitarian legislation that prohibits people’s eviction.
Ministry’s lawyers tried to resort to the decision, but Judge Eyre prevented his intervention. Among the arguments that tried to submit to the consideration of the magistrate was his concern that the precautionary order “was a serious interference” in the obligation of the ministry to ensure the human rights of asylum applicants, and that it could end up being “a stimulus for new protests and demonstrations.”
Temperate response
The Starmer government has responded in the most measured way possible to the precautionary order and its implications. The management of irregular immigration has been the largest headache of Downing Street in the first year of legislature, and the figures of people who arrive irregularly to the coast of England have not stopped growing: more than 50,000 immigrants have made that journey since the Labor Party came to power in July 2024.
The new executive promised to put an end to the hotel accommodation system for the end of the legislature, in 2029. The political and street pressure now aggravated with this sentence, converts the situation and the date into something unsustainable. Starmer has launched, with the purpose of fighting the mafias that traffic with people and organizing vessels. And has managed to close with France an irregular immigrants exchange agreement. But nothing is enough to stop an issue that politicians, as in other parts of Europe, have decided to use as a throwing weapon.
“The use of hotels has become completely unsustainable. The court order makes it clear that it cannot be expected until 2029,” said Enver Solomon, president of the humanitarian organization Refugee Council. “Our workers are witnessing how protests and growing hostility have caused those who flee from wars and persecution live terrified in the places where they are forced to reside,” he said.
The Government still trusts that the Judgment of The Bell is an isolated case. Similar demands in recent years had been dismissed until time by British justice. But the pressure has also reached the judges, and Downing Street has begun to accelerate the plans to provide alternative accommodations to asylum seekers.
