(5 Dec 2018) After two decades of living in a legal limbo on a British military base in Cyprus, a Sudanese refugee and 30 other migrants have been granted permanent residency by the UK government.
Tag Bashir was among a group from Ethiopia, Iraq, Sudan and Syria whose fishing boat landed on the shores of RAF Akrotiri on this tiny, east Mediterranean island nation in October 1998.
They had set sail from Lebanon to Italy, but people traffickers instead abandoned them in Cyprus.
For years, the group waged a legal battle to get British authorities to allow them to reach the UK.  
Britain had refused, saying that the Refugee Convention was never extended to the two military bases that it retained after Cyprus gained independence from British colonial rule in 1960.
But just before the British Supreme Court hearing that was scheduled for late last month, the British government decided to settle the case and grant the six families permanent residency “due to the highly unusual circumstances.”
The 46 year-old construction worker who fled Sudan’s civil war said that “anywhere in the UK is a better place” than Dhekelia’s dilapidated, corrugated iron houses in Cyprus, slated for demolition years ago.
Bashir added that he could not wait to settle in the UK and start a future with his wife and three children.

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