LONDON — He braved trains racing by at up to 100 mph to walk about 30 miles through the Channel Tunnel from France to Britain this summer, becoming a potent symbol of the desperation of migrants seeking a better life.
Since then, Abdul Rahman Haroun, 40, from Sudan, has spent nearly three months in a cell at the HM Elmley prison, in southeast England, and he now faces up to two years in jail.
While Haroun's determination impressed some, prosecutors and Eurotunnel, which operates the Channel Tunnel, said he had put his life and the lives of others at risk by undertaking the perilous journey.
The case has now become a centerpiece of complaints by advocates for migrants who say people with potential refugee claims are being unjustly prosecuted by the authorities instead of processed for asylum, as they are obligated to do under international conventions.
Haroun has been charged with "obstructing a railway carriage or engine" under an arcane piece of legislation called the Malicious Damage Act, which labor historians note was once used to criminalize Luddites, textile artisans who were destroying new factory machinery in the 19th century. At a preliminary hearing on Aug. 24, he pleaded not guilty.
Rights groups say that he has been made a political scapegoat at a time when immigrants are not welcome in Britain, and that the authorities are looking to send a strong signal to deter others.
The law office representing Haroun declined to speak about the case while it is pending, and the Justice Ministry declined a request to interview Haroun in prison.
Human rights advocates familiar with his case, however, said Haroun, illiterate and destitute, had been confused by his incarceration. Yet he remains determined to seek asylum in the country he took tremendous risks to get to.
The journey through the Channel Tunnel was frightening, he told them.
"The trains were much faster than in Sudan," he was quoted as saying by an aid worker, who like all others asked about Haroun requested anonymity because they are not allowed to comment on the case while it is pending. "You didn't know when they were coming," he said.
Haroun, human right advocates said, was forced to flee his rural village near Darfur, long an epicenter of hunger and civil strife in Sudan, after it was attacked by government forces.
Unable to speak English, he cannot read or write Arabic and is daunted by the paperwork necessary to apply for asylum, they said.
He feels isolated in his cell and does not understand why he is being treated as a criminal, they said. A religious Muslim, he has no friends or relatives in Britain, and has been receiving counseling from both the Christian and Muslim chaplains in prison. He wants to study English, but has not been able to do so in prison, the rights advocates said.
Nevertheless, they said, he has been heartened by notes of support from Britons impressed by his bravery.
As Europe grapples with one of its worst humanitarian crises in decades, spurred by a massive influx of migrants, about 6,000 migrants fleeing civil war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East remain camped out near Calais, France, the entry point for the Channel Tunnel.
From there, they continue to search for any opportunity to make the Channel Tunnel crossing to Britain, where they hope to find greater opportunities and social benefits to start a new life.
Earlier this month, two Iranian men followed in Haroun's footsteps by walking through the Channel Tunnel from Calais and are believed to have employed a movable plank usually used by engineers to avoid live wires that could have proved deadly. They were arrested in Folkestone, in Kent County, and have been charged under the same legislation as Haroun.
Sixteen people have been killed in or around Calais since June as they try to get to England, according to Eurotunnel, and there are about 150 nightly attempts by migrants to get into Eurotunnel's terminal near Calais.
In late September, an Eritrean man in his 20s was killed when a freight train ran him over. That followed the electrocution of a young man, believed by the French authorities to be Syrian, who tried to climb on the roof of a train near the entrance of the tunnel.
"They like to believe they can turn the U.K. into a fortress, but Abdul Rahman Haroun has proved them wrong, and because of that they intend to make an example out of him," Calais Migrant Solidarity, an advocacy group fighting for his release, wrote on its blog.
The group called Haroun's prosecution "a politically motivated attack on the freedom of movement designed to intimidate those who would follow his example."
Immigration experts specializing in asylum cases said that criminalizing the flight of refugees seeking asylum contravened the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, to which Britain is a signatory.
Those who drafted the 1951 convention recognized that refugees could be forced to use illegal means to seek sanctuary, said Colin Yeo, a leading immigration lawyer at Garden Court Chambers in London and founder of Free Movement, a popular blog that focuses on immigration issues. Article 31 of the convention, he said, protects refugees against prosecution for illegal entry into a country.
It is a moral and legal imperative to address legitimate asylum claims, Yeo said, citing the case of Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker who helped rescue 669 mostly Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, including by forging documents.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission, an independent watchdog set up by the British Parliament in the late 1990s to investigate alleged wrongful convictions, has expressed concern that hundreds of asylum seekers without legal travel documents may have been wrongly convicted because of misunderstandings or abuses of the law.
The commission said that from 2011 to 2015, it had referred 32 cases of asylum-seekers who might have been wrongly convicted of travel document offenses back to relevant appeal courts. An additional 64 cases are either under review or waiting for reviews to begin, according to the commission.
So far, convictions in the cases, which include asylum seekers from Sudan, Syria and elsewhere, have been quashed in all but two of the cases where an appeal has been heard, the commission said.
"These cases represent multiple failings of the system," said Justin Hawkins, a spokesman for the commission.
"The individuals were wrongly advised to plead guilty by their defense lawyers," Hawkins said. "The decisions to prosecute them was flawed, and the court system failed to spot these cases for what they are and to put a stop to the proceedings."
Haroun, advocates said, is expected to reiterate his plea of not guilty at a November hearing on his case. His trial is scheduled for January.