A chef from Bangladesh who was wrongly recorded as a sex offender by the Home Office has won the right to remain in the UK after fighting since 2010.
Saiful Islam, 47, arrived in the UK in 2003 at the age of 27 after being granted a work permit to take up a job as a chef in a Thai restaurant. In 2005 he raised the alarm with the police and the Home Office that his employer was exploiting him by withholding most of his wages, forcing him to work 18-hour days, and beating him.
The Home Office allowed him to move to a different employer but when he applied for indefinite leave to remain in 2010, when his work permit was about to expire, he was instead served with a notice curtailing his visa.
It later emerged that the Home Office had wrongly recorded that he had entered the UK illegally and that he was a convicted sex offender, despite him having no criminal convictions.
Now, after a case that has spanned seven prime ministers, from Tony Blair to Rishi Sunak, involved multiple court cases and a huge volume of correspondence with the Home Office, Islam has been granted leave to remain in the UK.
Islam welcomed the decision, but said he would fight on for better compensation than the £5,000 offered by the Home Office. “I can never get back the time I’ve lost nor the impact on my health. I was a young man when I came to the UK but I have aged so much. I am an honest man. I am saving money so that one day I will be able to open my own restaurant,” he said.
Fizza Qureshi, chief executive of Migrants’ Rights Network, who has supported Islam, welcomed the Home Office decision. “We hope Saiful can now rebuild his life,” she said. “What we fail to understand is why this was not decided sooner. The Home Office has left him in turmoil and uncertainty for so many years.”
During his campaign for justice, Islam wrote thousands of letters and emails to parliamentarians, journalists, Home Office officials and others he believed could help.
His right to remain in the UK had been rejected by a court in 2019, despite a judge identifying multiple errors by the Home Office, including wrongly curtailing his visa, linking other people’s criminal convictions to him, and failing to disclose a full copy of his passport to the court in 2010.
Judge Jackson in the upper tribunal of the immigration chamber said that problems with a work permit application made by another employer on Islam’s behalf in 2008 meant he did not qualify for leave to remain in the UK.
In 2019 Home Office officials issued a full apology to Islam, stating in an email to him that he had been wrongly recorded as a sex offender. The email admits that police national computer checks on Islam’s file pertained to three other people.
It states: “After investigating the issue it appears documents relating to three individuals were incorrectly placed on your paper file. A number of processes had not been followed which allowed these errors to occur.” The document adds: “Although such errors are not common … we recognise that such issues can have significant impacts.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “We do not routinely comment on individual cases.”
