After suffering years of harassment and arbitrary arrests, the news gave Somali journalist and human rights activist Abdalle Mumin a rare jolt of optimism: he’d been awarded a research fellowship at the University of York. Four thousand miles away, a fresh start beckoned, free from the persecution that dogged his outspoken reporting. Now only the small matter of a prison cell door stood between him and safe haven in the UK.
“I immediately thought: ‘How am I going to get out of this jail?’,” Mumin recalls. “I was even thinking of sneaking out at night, but it was too risky – they would have shot me.”
Mumin is one of dozens of human rights defenders, persecuted academics and asylum-seeking students to find refuge, community and academic freedom with the backing of the University of York.
