The Home Office has paid out £15,500 in compensation after admitting handing over sensitive information about an asylum seeker to the government of his Middle East home country, a move which could have endangered his life and that of his family.
The settlement relates to confidential proof of his persecution in his home country which was wrongly shared with the authorities there. The case has similarities to celebrity phone hacking cases where public figures such as Sadie Frost and Paul Gascoigne received six-figure sums following data breaches.
Although the payout is less than in the celebrity phone hacking cases, arguably the risk to the life of the asylum seeker involved is greater.
The Home Office shared the sensitive documents with the authorities in the man’s home country in a bid to authenticate the information he had given them to prove he had been persecuted at home.
The man’s solicitor Dan Carey, of Deighton Pierce Glynn, said that when the asylum seeker discovered what the Home Office had done it had “a considerable impact on him”.
Carey said: “In this case, the asylum seeker’s claims were later found to be genuine and the Home Office granted him asylum in the UK. However, his safety and that of his family was put at risk by the Home Office’s actions in sending documents evidencing state persecution to the state authorities in question.
“The Home Office were slow to concede that they had done anything wrong in this case, which makes me worry that it was not an isolated aberration. Asylum seekers entrust the government with extremely sensitive, sometimes life-threatening, information in the course of their asylum claims and it is vital to the integrity of that system that it is kept confidential. Least of all do they expect that it will be shared with their persecutors in their country of origin. This can place lives at risk and prevent any hope of future return.”
The Home Office refused to answer Freedom of Information Act requests submitted by Carey to try to ascertain the numbers of incidents of unauthorised sharing of asylum information on the basis that there was no central monitoring of the issue, and so it would take too long to go through each case individually.
In a previous data breach case in 2016 relating to migrants where confidential information relating to family returns was inadvertently published online, the Home Office also paid compensation.
The Home Office said: “In accordance with our obligations under the Refugee Convention and European and UK law, we do not disclose information about an individual’s asylum claim to that person’s home country, or seek information in a way that could expose them, or any family who remain in that country, to serious risk. We take any breach of this principle extremely seriously.”
