Save Betty Tibakawa!
The UK Border Agency is yet again trying to deport asylum seekers who are gay or who are thought to be gay back to Uganda. Uganda remember is the country which until very recently was debating passing a bill in their parliament which would punish homosexuality by death. Imagine what sort of attitudes are fuelling that level of hatred, and imagine what effects such mainstream views would have on how people treat gay people or people who are thought to be gay. How can the Home Office, allegedly a champion of gay rights for its staff, still be indifferent to the consequences of homophobia abroad? Others agree:
Emma Ginn, co-ordinator of Medical Justice, said: “Despite compelling medical evidence, the UK Border Agency disbelieves Ms Tibikawa’s story. UKBA do not dispute that Ms Tibikawa has scars caused by a hot flat iron, but conclude that she did not suffer any ill-treatment in Uganda. We condemn the fact that they intend to deport Ms Tibakawa to a country where being gay is illegal and puts your life at risk.”
Human Rights Watch spokeswoman Gauri van Gulik said: “Our research has shown that many cases of women like Betty are not taken seriously by the UK Border Agency. Unfortunately women who suffer this kind of violence have serious difficulty claiming asylum.”
Betty Tibakawa, a young lesbian living in Uganda, had gone for a walk on the beach when she was approached by three men she did not know, but who knew her by reputation, who began taunting her about her sexuality.
They took her to a disused building where she was violently assaulted. The men kicked her in the stomach, pinned her down and branded her inner thighs with hot irons. She lost consciousness and when she woke up, the men were gone. Her injuries were so severe that she could not leave her home for two months.
In February, Ugandan magazine Red Pepper outed Betty as a lesbian, publishing an article about her illustrated with photos, and the claim that she is ‘wanted’ for being a lesbian.
It has become incredibly dangerous for her to return to Uganda, where she has been disowned by her family and faces the risk of violent persecution for being gay.
Betty Tibakawa has had her asylum application turned down and is facing deportation back to Uganda, where homosexuality is illegal. Gay women who are deported to Uganda risk being raped and assaulted whilst they are in custody.
We are petitioning the Home Office to overrule this decision from the UK Border Agency, to give Betty the chance to live a life free from violence and fear. No one should be deported to country where they will be persecuted for their sexuality. We owe those seeking asylum in this country better than this.
Please sign the petition from this page.
Petition put together by Betty Tibakawa’s Campaign Group.
Another Asylum Seeker Killed by the State
Yet again a ‘failed’ asylum seeker has suffered brutalisation by the state, but this time the agency contracted out to ‘remove’ him killed him:
Police are investigating the death of [Jimmy] Mubenga, a 46-year-old Angolan who lost consciousness when three G4S guards attempted to restrain him on British Airways Flight 77 flight on Tuesday night. He was later taken to hospital where he was pronounced dead. No arrests have been made.
On Thursday two passengers told the Guardian that guards placed Mubenga in handcuffs and heavily restrained him while the aircraft was still on the runway. One said Mubenga complained of breathing problems before passing out.
[Witness] Michael said he heard Mubenga complain he was unable to breathe.
“I’m pretty sure it will turn out to be asphyxiation,” he said. “The last thing we heard the man say was he couldn’t breathe. We had three security guards and each one of them looked like they weighed 100kg plus, bearing down and holding him down – from what I could see below the seats.”
Michael described as “completely false” the official accounts of Mubenga’s death, released by the Home Office and G4S on Wednesday.
The Home Office said a deportee had been “taken ill” while on the flight. G4S used similar wording, saying Mubenga “became unwell”, forcing the flight to return to Heathrow. “Sadly, the detainee passed away upon arrival at the hospital,” the statement said.
This is far from abnormal for the UK Border Agency, and their account is contradicted by another witness:
Kevin Wallis, a passenger on the aircraft, said he had been sitting across the aisle from Mubenga and watched as three security guards restrained him with what he believed to be excessive force.
Wallis said he heard Mubenga complain: “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe” for at least 10 minutes before he lost consciousness, and later observed that handcuffs had been used in the restraint.
Our asylum system is entirely bereft of compassion and common sense. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/15/deportation-jimmy-mubenga-borders:
Anyone employed as an immigration adviser, as I am, is aware of the use and abuse of state-sanctioned force against immigrants that lies just beneath the Home Office UK Border Agency‘s “firm but fair” rhetoric. I’ll never forget representing a 24-year-old Ugandan woman who was HIV-positive and weighed only six stone, who bravely spoke out to the BBC about her treatment by officers inside Colnbrook immigration removal centre: “Two were holding my arms, two were holding my legs and then they hit my head on the floor,” she said. “I was feeling pain and then they twisted my arms and pressed my head on the bed. “I couldn’t breathe and then I was shouting ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe’ but they were just twisting it harder.” For his part, Tom Riall, chief executive of the home affairs division of Serco, which runs Colnbrook, said staff there do their jobs “with care and decency and considerable respect for all of those in our charge”. “We only use physical restraint as a last resort,” he added.
She also explains why:
But the raison d’etre for this inhumanity is public enough: it is UK government policy to remove more people. An intensification of border control inevitably sacrifices a human approach: from visa national lists to the criteria of the UK’s points-based immigration system, the focus is on particular nationalities or categories of people to exclude from the UK. Target-driven deportation and removal statistics dictate who leaves and when, rather than the needs and desires of the individual human being at stake. Under this political agenda, the UK has become part of a “fortress Europe” that is spending ever more money and force on controlling human movements and on securing its borders.
This is the problem, and it’s resulted in a cowardly and racist immigration policy to placate the country’s Daily HateMail readers, rather than one which reasonably addresses the serious issues surrounding international migration. It led to Jacqui Smith’s Home Office’s disinterest in reprieves for LGBT asylum seekers from being sent back to countries such as Uganda and Iran, it leads to the destitution of ‘failed’ asylum seekers while they’re in the UK and doesn’t acknowledge the genuine social and economic needs of the UK economy. New Labour has gone but it’s left behind a legacy of mistrust of asylum seekers, whom it frequently conflated with economic migrants – just take a look at this comment about his criminal record:
Hmm, I see that the author makes no reference to :
In 2006, Mubenga was convicted of actual bodily harm after a brawl in a nightclub and given a two-year sentence.
From the linked Guardian article. So he had a history of violence and had broken the law in this country. What were the guards supposed to do, bring him tea & biscuits?
His death is to be regretted, but not the deportation or the policy behind deportation. Especially for conviced criminals who have abused this country’s hospitality.
Should that give the state the right to cause his death and then lie about it? What sort of society are we becoming?
Home Office’s Anti-Gay Asylum Seeker Policy Shot Down
In a serious indictment of the horrific authoritarianism of New Labour’s Home Office, the UK Supreme Court has shot down its policy of refusing asylum to gay refugees from countries such as Iran because they could avoid persecution by being ‘discreet’:
Two gay men who said they faced persecution in their home countries have the right to asylum in the UK, the Supreme Court has ruled.
The panel of judges said it had agreed “unanimously” to allow the appeals from the men, from Cameroon and Iran.
They had earlier been refused asylum on the grounds they could hide their sexuality by behaving discreetly.
It was an inhuman policy, which no doubt Alan Johnson will go back on the TV politics shows to defend. And the counter-argument of course is that anyone could pretend they’re gay in order to claim asylum, but of course it’s the job of the UK Border Agency to determine the legitimacy of all asylum claims. Brendan Keenan is right when he says:
Equally important is that while one paragraph makes reference to stereotypes of gay men enjoying Kylie Minogue and “exotically coloured cocktails” (paragraph 78), it does so only to make the broader point that sexuality is a living thing, expressed in infinitely different and individual ways, and that as a result each individual’s case must be treated with the respect and attention it deserves, rather than looking solely at some prescribed categories of behaviour or preconceptions.
And Lord Hope got it equally right however in the ruling, when he said:
“To compel a homosexual person to pretend that his sexuality does not exist or suppress the behaviour by which to manifest itself is to deny his fundamental right to be who he is.
“Homosexuals are as much entitled to freedom of association with others who are of the same sexual orientation as people who are straight.”
The court said it would be passing detailed guidance to the lower courts about how to treat such cases in the future.
We live in a bizarre political landscape when Theresa May thanks the Supreme Court for justifying her Tory Home Office’s liberal position on this.
Alan Johnson Attacks Asylum Seekers
If you need last minute proof why New Labour is no longer fit to govern, check out Home Secretary Alan Johnson’s defence of the government’s policy of destituting asylum seekers:
”What people see is a sort of ”Euro-friendly” that would have us in the single currency. They would have an amnesty for illegal immigrants, they would allow asylum seekers to work, which is utter, utter madness.”
I think that’s an appalling, inhuman position to take. New Labour’s policy of forced destitution of asylum seekers has been one of the many low points of their period in office, but Cathy Newman has gone further and fact-checked Johnson’s wider claim that it was ‘madness’ because 83% of asylum seekers were found not to have had a genuine claim:
His 83 per cent figure ignores 10 per cent of asylum claims which were granted leave to stay in the UK on humanitarian or discretionary grounds – making it hard to dismiss these as not genuine.
He also ignores the cases subsequently found to have genuine merit on appeal – just over a quarter of those that make it through to an appeal tribunal.
That’s not to dispute that the majority of asylum claims are rejected. But given the context in which Johnson cited the statistic and the need to be careful about the way figures are presented on such an emotive subject, we rate his claim fiction.
Good old Alan Johnson. The party which is currently promoting ‘fairness for all’ clearly means nothing of the sort.
