A refugee charity says it has “no regrets whatsoever” about publishing a video in which a Holocaust survivor criticises the Home Secretary, amid a growing row with the government.
Freedom From Torture told Third Sector it has no plans to remove the footage, despite a request from the Home Office.
It posted the 60-second clip on Saturday, showing an edited version of an exchange between Joan Salter and Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary.
The Home Office has asked the charity to delete the clip, saying the video misrepresents the conversation between Salter and Braverman, but Freedom From Torture has dismissed the request.
In the footage, which has been viewed five million times, Salter tells Braverman that she had been forced to flee the Nazis in Belgium in 1943 and travelled across Europe to find safety in the UK.
Salter criticises Braverman for using words like “swarms” and “invasion” to describe asylum seekers, which she likens to “the language used to dehumanise and justify the murder of my family and millions of others”.
In response, the Home Secretary told Salter: “I won’t apologise for the language that I have used to demonstrate the scale of the problem.”
In the longer version of the video of the exchange, Braverman also describes her own background as the daughter of migrants to the UK and promotes the Home Office’s work through some refugee resettlement schemes.
Sonya Sceats, chief executive of Freedom From Torture, said this afternoon: “We will not remove our original video and we have no regrets whatsoever.”
She said that, in editing the original video, “we simply abridged the footage to cut out the preparatory remarks that Suella Braverman made before she actually answered the question that Joan put to her”.
The full video, like the edited version, shows the Home Secretary displaying “precisely zero empathy for Joan, who disclosed the terrible circumstances of her early life”, according to Sceats.
The full exchange was available to the press “right from the start” and was later published on the charity’s website, she added.
Asked whether the Home Office was right to ask for the video to be removed, Sceats said: “They have no legal basis for making this request, and that was evident from the fact it was a press officer at the Home Office who made the request of us and not their lawyers.
“At no point have they provided any legal rationale for their request and we do not believe that there is such a rationale.”
Sceats also suggested that asking for the video’s removal could have done the Home Office more harm than good.
“All this has served to achieve is greater notoriety for the stunt, and a second wave of stories about the pressure that Freedom From Torture was placed under by the Home Office to remove a video of the Home Secretary making offensive remarks to a member of the public at a constituency event,” she said.
The charity said it had been working with Salter “for some time” on helping her put her concerns directly to the Home Secretary.
Some Freedom From Torture staff joined Salter at the event on Friday to support her and film the exchange.
Sceats said she hoped the publicity about the video would encourage more people to “stand with” Freedom From Torture and other refugee charities.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Footage of a conversation [of the Home Secretary] with a holocaust survivor is circulating online. The video has been heavily edited and doesn’t reflect the full exchange.
“The Home Secretary listened carefully to the testimony. She thanked her for sharing her story. The Home Secretary also expressed her sympathy and set out why it is important to tackle illegal migration.
“Since the footage misrepresents the interaction about a sensitive area of policy, we have asked the organisation who posted the video to take it down.”