Podcast on international students campaign

Podcast on international students campaign

On 4 February 2019, our Director Nazek Ramadan and member Nomi spoke to Tiernan Douieb of the Partly Political Podcast. 

They spoke to him about the campaign for justice for tens of thousands of international students wrongly accused of cheating on the TOEIC English test in 2014, and Nazek also spoke more broadly about migration issues in the UK.

Referring to the horrifying situation in which the students still find themselves, five years after the initial allegations, Nazek said, "A criminal would have better opportunity to defend themselves... you accuse them of something, present the evidence against them show evidence and you allow them to go to court to defend themselves… These students have not had the same opportunity. They are just told, ‘you cheated, get out of the country’.. and by the way, there is no evidence against you.”

Later she said, speaking of the students affected, "They came here as young men and women, 20, 21 years old, they had all these hopes and dreams and then suddenly all this collapsed before their eyes and instead of having the best experience and education in the world, they had this nightmare and they’ve lost five years trying to fight for justice, trying to clear their names.”

Nomi spoke about his experience being arrested at 5:45am by 15 immigration officials at his home in June 2014, totally out of the blue. He then spent more than four months in a detention centre.

“We were being treated like criminals," he said. "I can’t forget those days. Whenever I try to sleep or close my eyes, those days come back."

“We have had the very worst experience of our lives," Nomi said later. "We didn’t come to the UK to end up in prison… I came here to study, and my family sent me with great hopes to the best country in the world to study the best education.”

The podcast was released on 5 February and you can listen to it here. Listen to Nazek from 18:57 and Nomi from 47:45.