The deadly waiting game

Ten minutes by taxi from the centre of Nairobi are the offices of the Refugee Consortium of Kenya. It’s here, on a still, warm afternoon, that Eva Maina — a young, quietly spoken law graduate — describes to me her work as a lawyer working with refugees from throughout East Africa. As she talks it becomes increasingly clear that the refugee ‘queue’, so frequently mentioned by Philip Ruddock, operates much more like a lottery. “There’s quite a gap,” she says, “between how things should be and how they are.” [Introduction]