Jeremy Corbyn marks Human Rights Day with visit to Freedom from Torture

The Labour Party leader and constituency MP for our London Centre, Jeremy Corbyn, visited Freedom from Torture this week ahead of international Human Rights Day.  

In preparation for a speech in Westminster this morning, marking today as UN Human Rights Day, Mr Corbyn met with torture survivors and listened to their views on issues such as immigration detention, long waits in the asylum system and the UK’s role in promoting human rights abroad.

Mr Corbyn said he was ‘very proud to be the MP for the constituency which has Freedom from Torture in it’ and that he recognised the vital role that therapy plays in helping survivors rebuild their lives in the UK. One survivor told him that ‘we lost one home but found a new home here’. 

During the visit, Mr Corbyn pledged his support for Freedom from Torture’s new ‘Proving Torture’ campaign, which seeks to tackle the repeated rejection by Home office caseworkers of expert medical evidence of torture, and said he will be calling on the Home Secretary to take action to improve asylum decision-making for torture survivors.

Mr Corbyn pledged his support for Freedom from Torture’s new ‘Proving Torture’ campaign, which seeks to tackle the repeated rejection by Home office caseworkers of expert medical evidence of torture, and said he will be calling on the Home Secretary to take action to improve asylum decision-making for torture survivors.

He was also introduced to our Natural Growth Project, a unique service that combines horticulture with psychotherapy, and spent time in our therapy garden with some of those who attend the group.

Mr Corbyn told the survivors he met that he would be using today’s speech to passionately defend the Human Rights Act, which he said simply guarantees basic rights for all and must not be deemed as ‘controversial’ by the Government or media.

Freedom from Torture has today also signed an open letter to the Prime Minister, from 165 different organisations, urging her to drop the government’s commitment to ‘scrap’ the Human Rights Act, which we say would threaten the ‘absolute ban on torture’.

Human Rights Day is observed every year on 10 December. It commemorates the day on which, in 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.