Portsmouth City of Sanctuary
We were happy to welcome Shamila Dhana to our December meeting to talk about refugees and the work of Portsmouth City of Sanctuary. She was a migrant herself, arriving in the UK in 2003 from Zimbabwe. She was passionate to speak the truth about migrants. There are many terms used, often wrongly, for a refugee, or asylum seeker, migrant or illegal. The main definition comes from the refugee convention of 1941, followed by a protocol a few years later. It defines a Refugee as someone out of their country of birth, with a well-founded fear of persecution, against race, nationality, political group, religion or sexual orientation. It may seem like the UK has a big problem, particularly with those trying to cross the English Channel, but we are not even in the top 10 countries for arriving refugees; Turkey leads the table with about 6