Courage! That is the theme of World Refugee Week this year, and it has never been more needed.

One in every 70 people on earth has been forced to leave everything behind, flee their home and escape persecution, war or conflict. It takes a deep, quiet courage to uproot yourself and step into the unknown, carrying almost nothing, hoping only for safety. But that journey becomes the thing that defines you in the eyes of governments, systems and borders. Your history, your profession, your relationships, your entire humanit is reduced to a risk category, a case number, a data point.

That is not an accident. It is a design choice.

Fighting the Digital Hostile Environment

The hostile environment has always been a policy of intimidation. Now, it has become digital. Algorithms sift through asylum claims. AI facial recognition tools will be used to estimate the ages of children, many of whom will be traumatised by their journey to the UK. Migrants have lost the security of physical documents that prove their right to be in the UK, replaced by digital e-visas that glitch and fail. Automated systems make or influence decisions that determine who gets to stay in the UK, who is detained and who is removed, all with little transparency, limited rights of appeal and no real explanation about how the automation works. Those most affected by these systems are the least able to challenge them.

Our work is to make the invisible visible, to hold the Home Office and government accountable for how they use AI and data in the asylum system.

That work takes courage, too.

It takes courage!

It takes courage for MPs to stand up for migrants, refugees, and those seeking safety in the UK, fully aware of the backlash that will come their way. The politicians who demand scrutiny of AI in asylum decision-making, who have asked difficult questions in Parliament and haven’t walked away from the answers, are doing something that genuinely costs them something.

It takes courage from every ORG supporter who writes to their MP, joins our campaigns, sits in meetings, and lends their voice against a digital hostile environment that grows more powerful and less accountable each year. Choosing solidarity, especially when solidarity itself is under attack, is no small act.

Courage is never solitary. It grows. It is built from steady, everyday choices to show up, speak out and refuse to look away. Each of these choices, layered together, is what makes accountability possible and change real.

So this Refugee Week, we salute the courage of people who never chose their journey but walked it anyway. We salute the courage of individuals and communities that confront hate marches and stop them in their tracks. We salute those who refuse to let digital systems quietly automate racism and the hostile environment.

Thank you. The work continues.