Steve Valdez-Symonds

Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International UK’s Refugee & Migrant Rights Programme Director, explores the theme of this year’s Refugee Week: Home.

The UK Government's latest immigration bill not only threatens to dismantle our asylum system, but also carries alarming implications for families, children, citizenship and human rights. With far-reaching consequences, this bill...

2022: A horrible year. What’s next? 2022 was the year in which everything changed and yet everything stayed the same. Priti Patel began the year as Home Secretary. Suella Braverman finished the year in that post. And Grant Shapps made...

Wherever we come from, we all have the right to be safe . But, Priti Patel and the government don't think so. On 28th June, the UK's interpretation of the definition of a refugee and the rights to which every person who is a refugee is...

The government is seeking to acquire the power to secretly strip someone of their citizenship. The Nationality and Borders Bill contains many dangerous and divisive provisions. It will damage the UK’s asylum system, hinder people from...

Children as young as 10 are being denied their rights to British citizenship because they are, or might be, assessed by the Home Office not to be of good character

If the criminal justice system is to be fair, then it must ensure that nobody is punished more than others for the same offence.

The review set up by the Home Office to learn lessons from the Windrush scandal has closed for receiving written evidence. But will they be learned?

Thousands of children born in the UK are growing up without the British citizenship they are entitled to by law. This is a national scandal which has long gone largely unnoticed. Could that be about to change?

The word 'illegal' comes very easy to policy and law makers, but very few give much thought to what it means and whom it affects.

The Home Office has finally responded to mounting pressure over its disgraceful indifference to Commonwealth citizens, whose lives have been turned upside down several decades after they first settled in the UK. But is it enough?

Unless the government faces up to the past, injustices like those suffered by the Windrush generation are certain to be repeated.

How can someone born in this country, having lived here all her life, find herself threatened with removal by the government to somewhere she doesn’t know and has never been? How can this happen when she's entitled, by the law, to...

As the Italian Government makes the cruel decision to send warships to assist the coastguard in returning people to Libya, we need to demand that EU leaders instead make saving lives the priority.

By Steve Valdez-Symonds, Programme Director - Refugee and Migrant Rights Today Amnesty International and Student Action for Refugees (STAR) have linked the Home Office and the Department for Education in a giant paper chain of united...

This blog was first published on inews.co.uk on 11 February 2017. When the Home Secretary announced this week that the government would end its scheme to bring lone child refugees already in Europe to the UK, she claimed it had to...

On 20 January 2017, Donald J Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States of America. Even before becoming president-elect, his rhetoric on immigration – and the encouragement this has given to extremists...

Over recent days, the relationship between the French and UK governments has been strained by renewed disagreement over who should take responsibility for children at Calais. The two governments have once more effectively abandoned...

Children who have fled from conflict zones and brutal regimes are finally being reunited with family in the UK. This should be a cause for celebration. Many have been living in squalor at risk from traffickers and abusers for months...

Mo Farah arguably just became the UK’s greatest ever Olympian. When he led the field across the line on Sunday, he completed a sensational back-to-back double – winning both 5,000 and 10,000 metre golds at London 2012 and Rio 2016. Of...