UK failed to resettle Afghans facing torture, death despite promise, The Guardian said

Afghan nationals who were promised resettlement to the UK nearly a year ago are facing torture and death while they wait for a response from the British government, the Observer can reveal.

Not one person has been accepted and evacuated from Afghanistan under the Home Office’s Afghan citizens’ resettlement scheme (ACRS), launched in January, prompting claims that ministers are showing a “toxic combination of incompetence and indifference”.

The scheme was intended to help Afghans who worked for, or were affiliated with, the British government – including its embassy staff and British Council teachers – and all of whom face severe harm at the hands of the Taliban.

Britain’s efforts to evacuate at-risk Afghans in the days after the fall of Kabul in August 2021 were heavily criticized when it emerged that many of those who worked for or alongside the UK were left behind, according to the Guardian.

Under Taliban rule, poverty levels in Afghanistan have since surged, the rights of women have been rolled back and the UN has recorded at least 160 extrajudicial killings.

Through open-source intelligence, insights from forensic physicians and interviews with more than a dozen Afghans waiting to be relocated, a joint investigation by the Observer and Lighthouse Reports, a European investigations newsroom, has verified that people whom the UK pledged to help under the ACRS have been severely beaten and tortured by the Taliban.

The Home Office insisted that 6,300 Afghans had been brought to safety under the ACRS, but the Observer and Lighthouse Reports understand that none of these individuals have been accepted and relocated since January 2022, when the scheme was launched.