| AIRLINES were under pressure this week to refuse to carry failed asylum-seekers after a report suggested that many who were forced to leave Britain had been abused when going through the asylum process. The allegations of abuse coincide with a debate in Parliament on the UK Borders Bill.
A dossier compiled by the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCADC), stated that 200 people, who had been forced to return to their country of origin, had been beaten and racially abused by their British escorts. The Coalition called on airlines to refuse to carry such people against their will.
On Tuesday, one of the anti-deportation groups, the Cameroon’s Support Network, demonstrated outside immigration offices in Solihull. “Most, if not all, of the airline companies operating out of the UK are agents in enforcing Home Office decisions to remove refused asylum-seekers from the UK. Kenya Airways are the main airline that carries deportees back to Cameroon, and daily carries refused asylum-seekers to many different African countries,” it said.
The NCADC organiser for the North West and Greater Manchester, Emma Ginn, appealed to churches to help those wanting to avoid deportation. “All African people are very strong churchgoers. If you could offer us a priest who was willing to let his church be used as a sanctuary, we would be delighted.”
British Airways was said to have been paid £4.3 million to repatriate deportees. But one charter operator, XL Airways, which had flown deportees to the Democratic Republic of Congo, said on Tuesday that it had stopped doing so, out of sympathy for dispossessed people across the world.
Other companies said they were legally obliged to carry the deportees, but the Government confirmed that captains of individual planes could refuse to carry them if they believed the plane’s security was at risk, or if there were commercial questions.
The NCADC’s material, which was compiled by doctors, lawyers, immigration-centre visitors, and campaigners, alleges physical and sexual assault and racial abuse during the journey from Britain. For legal reasons, only some cases have been published in the press.
In one case, a 29-year-old woman, Beatrice, said she was taken from Yarl’s Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire, and put on a plane in Southampton, where she was held in leg bindings and handcuffs. When she complained, she was told: “If you do not go quietly, we will beat you.” One of the official escorts, whose duty it was to return her to Cameroon, said that if they did not return her, they would not get paid.
When she protested, a doctor and a female security guard forced her head down into her knees, and covered her head with a jacket. Another person clamped his hand over her mouth and kicked her legs.
When she was being transferred between flights in Paris, she tried to run away, but was tripped by one of the escorts. A French policeman knelt on her lower back and a British escort knelt on her shoulders. She was kneed in the groin, and blood poured from between her legs.
On the plane, she had multiple panic attacks. When she arrived in Cameroon, a British policeman, with two other passengers, who had all been on the same plane, reported her to Cameroon immigration. One witness reported that the airport manager had asked her to walk without support from her escorts, but she collapsed.
The Cameroon authorities were alleged to have said that if she died in prison, they would be blamed. They put her in a wheelchair and returned her to Britain.
When she arrived in Britain, she was taken by ambulance to Hillingdon Hospital, where she was treated for severe genital bleeding and multiple bruising over her body. The report said she was now back in Yarl’s Wood, waiting for the authorities to remove her to Cameroon again. |
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