our story

The global pandemic affected all of our lives in 2020, and not least the lives of people in Europe trying to reach sanctuary.  

The current Covid-19 crisis poses huge challenges. Travel restrictions set in across Europe meaning had to stay in dangerous camps far longer than they would have had it not been for the pandemic.

Government departments shut down, creating an even larger backlog of cases. Children have turned 18 and therefore can no longer access family reunion. During this period, we saw a stark increase in demand for our services. Between April and June, we doubled the number of cases our UK legal team took on compared to the previous time-period. In Greece, we began coordinating a consortium of charities to investigate issues and recommend changes in practice to the Greek authorities based on the situation for refugees resulting from the pandemic. 

Thanks to our efforts though, in May 2020, 47 people were brought to safety on an extraordinary flight to the UK from Greece. They had all been accepted to be in the UK but their travel was halted by the pandemic.

With our network of dedicated campaigners, we continued to fight for the protection of children and families after Brexit, which loomed on the 31 December 2020. Three significant votes were won in the House of Lords on the EU (withdrawal) Bill and the Immigration Bill, resulting in the government pledging to review family reunion.  Sadly however, family reunion to the UK as we had known it since 2015 stopped as a result of Brexit.  

Despite the above challenges, 87 children and families were brought to safety during this year, a marked increase on previous years.  

In early 2019, Safe Passage International was formed as an independent and international charity. For the past 4 years Safe Passage thrived within Citizens UK, however, to best meet the needs of the people we seek to serve it was decided to establish the new charity. This meant that the in-house UK legal team was established, able to provide direct representation for the first time in Safe Passage’s history.  

Safe Passage provided evidence to challenge the Home Office in court about delays children were facing when trying to reunite with their family in the UK. The court found that the Home Office failure to comply with the two-month deadline to ‘take charge’ of a case and this was unlawful. Thanks to the judgement children could now reunite quicker with their family in the UK from France.  

In 2019, 50 children were brought to safety and 529 people were supported through our work. Additionally, our expert teams in UK, France, and Greece trained 191 professionals so they can better support people in need of legal assistance.  

We campaigned throughout 2019 to make sure that children could still reunite with family after Brexit. 330,000 signed our petition, 20,000 emails were sent to MPs, and the Government was dealt their largest defeat to date in the House of Lords.   

2019 was also the year that our Young Leader’s Programme was established.  Former Safe Passage clients and other young refugees came together for workshops and sessions to build their skills and provide them with a platform for advocating on issues.

This was a crucial year to set our team up for 2020 when the UK was set to leave the European Union.  

Read in greater detail and find links to reports produced in 2019 in the Impact Report.

We launched a petition with Auberge Des Migrants to put pressure on President Macron and Prime Minister Theresa May to take action against the number of deaths happening at the Calais border. Both countries later that month signed the Sandhurst Treaty agreeing to our demands of a speeding up of the family reunion process from months to 25 days as well as removing restrictions to the Dubs Scheme that had meant many places remained unfilled.

Across Europe we continued to support the training of legal practitioners so even more unaccompanied child refugees can benefit from the family reunion process outside of our work — we trained 169 people in total.

In total we helped 50 unaccompanied children and vulnerable adults reach safety and worked on 117 cases.

We opened new routes between Italy and France, Switzerland and Norway, as well as help refugee families reunite in the UK from Turkey, Sudan and Saudi Arabia.

We conducted a report among unaccompanied minors in Paris and found 45% felt unsafe. Many were forced to sleep on the streets.

With the support of Lord Alf Dubs we successfully secured a major political win — an amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill that will maintain the right to family reunion for child refugees in Europe after Brexit.  

We launched the Our Turn campaign to mark 80 years since British communities took in 10,000 child refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. We’re asking our government to show the same compassion to the refugees of today. As part of the campaign we…

• Delivered a petition with 35,000 signatures to 10 Downing Street calling on Theresa May to accept 10,000 child refugees over the next 10 years.

• Gained commitments of 850 places for child refugees from councils across the country.

• Held a special Kindertransport commemoration event, bringing together 1,000 people that included Kindertransport survivors and their descendants and recently arrived refugees.

We successfully transferred 156 people to the UK in 2017, including taking 20 cases to court where their right to family reunion was refused.

We set up a team in Italy due to the increasing number of refugee arrivals from Libya; in 2017 there were over 8,000 child refugees with family links elsewhere in Europe living in shelters in the country. In January the first child refugee we helped in Italy arrived in the UK to be reunited with his aunt. By the end of the year we had completed six family reunions from Italy to the UK, Germany, France and Greece.

In France we completed 20 family reunions and litigated for others who had their family reunion cases refused. We trained over 40 child protection actors and set up a day centre with Médecins Sans Frontières so more child refugees know of their right to family reunion.

In Greece we trained over 187 legal practitioners so they can go on to successfully reunite more refugee children, in total we helped reunite 20 refugee families from Greece with a 100% success rate.

We also assisted with the transfer of the first unaccompanied children directly from Syria to the UK, when three orphans under the age of 12 were reunited with their uncle.

In January we won a landmark legal ruling at the Royal Courts of Justice, which opened up a legal route to family reunion for children in Calais. Three children and one vulnerable adult arrived safely in the UK days later.

By February we helped reunite our first child refugees we were helping in Greece with their family in the UK.

Together - with thousands of supporters across the country - we pushed our government to accept the ‘Dubs amendment’ on to the Immigration Bill. For the first time, the UK had agreed to accept some of the most vulnerable unaccompanied child refugees from Europe who did not have family in the UK.

But despite our work successful work pushing government and success in the courts, the it was still taking months for child refugees in Calais to reach the safety of the UK. As a result, children were still dying trying reach Britain on the back of lorries.

In October the French authorities decided to demolish the Calais camp. As a result the UK transferred 900 unaccompanied children through an expedited process, including 250 through the Dubs Scheme.

Our beginnings as a charity centre around a group of volunteers who travelled to Calais to see how they could meaningfully help. Unlike others who went carrying aid by the ton, they went with a simple question, why were thousands of refugees risking their lives trying to survive in the ‘Jungle’ and make the crossing to Britain?

They didn’t expect that from hundreds of children they would hear such a simple and compelling reason – that they had family in the UK who they were desperately trying to reach.

On their return, the group learned that many of them had a legal right to family reunion. This legal route had never once been used to reunite a refugee child with their family from France to Britain.

And so the story of Safe Passage International began.

We began as a partnership between lawyers (Islington Law Centre, Bhatt Murphy solicitors and Doughty Street Chambers), community organisers and faith leaders, determined to find a legal and safe way to help child refugees to reunite with their families.