Bishop Duleep de Chickera of the diocese of Colombo said in a letter sent to the Anglican Journal: “I find that many are unaware of a discriminatory British visa policy that Sri Lanka and a few selected countries continue to be subject to.”
In his letter, Bishop de Chickera explained how the policy was initially introduced in 2003 as a pilot project before being fully adopted in Sri Lanka as well as some African countries.
The website for the British High Commission also states that all applications in Sri Lanka for visas to travel to the UK “will only be issued following the result of checks against immigration records in the UK of the fingerprint scan”.
“From the time this policy was introduced, I have repeatedly raised concerns regarding this serious violation of the dignity and privacy of persons with the British High Commission in Colombo and, through the Archbishop of Canterbury, with the relative authorities in the UK,” he said.According to the letter, an official at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office defended the policy saying that it did “not discriminate against Sri Lankans because all applicants in Sri Lanka, irrespective of their nationality, had to be fingerprinted”.
Bishop de Chickera said, however, that the British authorities “were completely insensitive to the association of finger printing with criminality.”
He added that the measure “brought back embarrassing and painful memories of the humiliation Sri Lankans were subject to over the past decades due to international suspicion that all or most of us were either terrorists mala fide, asylum seekers or economic refugees.”
Bishop de Chickera also asserted that the British authorities had “forgotten or have not been adequately briefed on the adverse impact of colonisation which we suffered under British imperialism for one hundred and fifty years.”
The bishop is yet to receive a response from the Archbishop of Canterbury after writing to him for clarification that the scheme was not “being used for further violating the rights of persons”.
