“I feel vin­di­cat­ed.” That was the re­ac­tion of Dil­lian John­son in an emailed re­sponse mo­ments af­ter he was told that he had been grant­ed hu­man­i­tar­i­an pro­tec­tion by the Unit­ed King­dom Home Of­fice for the next five years.

John­son, fled the coun­try in De­cem­ber 2017 af­ter he was shot at his Gas­par­il­lo home. He claimed then that he was a vic­tim of a tar­get­ed hit.

In a de­tailed UK Home Of­fice let­ter sent yes­ter­day to John­son’s UK-based lawyers, Sarah Lat­timer and Michael Mc Gar­vey, the UK Home Of­fice of Visas and Im­mi­gra­tion said: “Dear Mr John­son, Your claim for asy­lum made on De­cem­ber 30, 2017, is re­fused. How­ev­er, I have de­cid­ed that you should be grant­ed hu­man­i­tar­i­an pro­tec­tion.”

The let­ter was signed by Richard Is­sacs on be­half of the Sec­re­tary of State.

Ac­cord­ing to UK Home Of­fice, John­son had ap­plied for refugee sta­tus on a “well-found­ed fear of per­se­cu­tion in Trinidad and To­ba­go on the ba­sis of your mem­ber­ship of a par­tic­u­lar so­cial group (a gay man).”

Ac­cord­ing to the doc­u­ment, John­son’s fears of per­se­cu­tion were mere­ly sub­jec­tive and did not qual­i­fy un­der the Gene­va Con­ven­tion for asy­lum seek­ers.

The Home Of­fice made this point clear in point 51 un­der the sec­tion As­sess­ment of fu­ture fear (suf­fi­cien­cy of pro­tec­tion) as they stat­ed: “In ad­di­tion, it al­so demon­strates a will­ing­ness and abil­i­ty of the po­lice to as­sist those who have faced is­sues re­lat­ing to their sex­u­al­i­ty, this cou­pled with the de­crim­i­nal­i­sa­tion of con­sen­su­al LGBT ac­tiv­i­ty clear­ly in­di­cates that even if it were ac­cept­ed that an in­di­vid­ual was at risk of per­se­cu­tion by non-state or rogue state ac­tors on ac­count of their sex­u­al­i­ty, such per­se­cu­tions is nei­ther state-spon­sored nor state con­doned.”

The sec­tion fur­ther stat­ed: “In light of the above con­clu­sions, it is ac­cept­ed that you have demon­strat­ed hav­ing a gen­uine sub­jec­tive fear on re­turn to Trinidad and To­ba­go on ac­count of your sex­u­al­i­ty at the time of your ap­pli­ca­tion for asy­lum. How­ev­er, for the rea­sons giv­en be­low it is con­sid­ered this gen­uine sub­jec­tive fear is not ob­jec­tive­ly well found­ed as suf­fi­cient pro­tec­tion is avail­able.”

The Home Of­fice al­so sought to di­rect John­son and his lawyers as to why he was grant­ed specif­i­cal­ly hu­man­i­tar­i­an pro­tec­tion un­der the UK laws.

“Hu­man­i­tar­i­an Pro­tec­tion must be grant­ed where there are sub­stan­tial grounds for be­liev­ing that there is a re­al risk of se­ri­ous harm. In con­sid­er­ing whether there are such grounds the stan­dard of proof to be ap­plied is the same as ap­plies in asy­lum, that is ‘a rea­son­able de­gree of like­li­hood’ that the per­son would face a ‘re­al risk’ of se­ri­ous harm on re­turn to their coun­try of ori­gin.”

Those not el­i­gi­ble for refugee sta­tus can ob­tain hu­man­i­tar­i­an pro­tec­tion. In this case, they can­not be re­moved from na­tion­al ter­ri­to­ry be­cause of ob­jec­tive and se­ri­ous per­son­al sit­u­a­tions.

Al­le­ga­tions sur­faced in 2017 that Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie tried to in­flu­ence Supreme Court jus­tices to change their per­son­al state-pro­vid­ed se­cu­ri­ty in favour of a pri­vate se­cu­ri­ty com­pa­ny that em­ploys his “close friend” Dil­lian John­son, a con­vict­ed felon, as a con­sul­tant.