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Battle to halt deportation of girl, 3, puts spotlight on UK asylum policy
By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor
Published: 02 January 2008
A mother's legal battle to stop the Government deporting her sick, three-year-old daughter threatens to shame Britain over its treatment of child asylum-seekers in a test case being considered by the European Court of Human Rights.
The plight of Adedoyin Fadairo, who was born in America but has lived almost her entire life in London, has shocked asylum campaigners. She has been issued with deportation papers telling her to report to Heathrow where she must board a flight for the US, although she has no family there. The order warns her that while in Britain she must not breach immigration rules and threatens her with detention.
Home Office officials have also written to her mother informing her that her daughter, who has a serious kidney disorder, is not entitled to medical attention as she is not a UK citizen.
The case has been taken up by the European Court of Human Rights which will consider the girl's treatment and the legality of separating families who are claiming asylum in this country.
The 32-year-old mother, a Nigerian citizen whohas lived in Britain for 10 years after fleeing persecution, is being held at Yarl's Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire where she is facing removal to west Africa. She has been separated from her daughter for 10 months.
Now the European Court of Human Rights has ordered the UK government to cancel the deportation so it can investigate the case.
Adedoyin is being cared for by her grandmother in London while her own daughter is detained. Repeated attempts to reunite mother and daughter have been rejected by the government, which has accused the mother of breaching immigration rules by allowing her daughter to benefit from medical treatment on the NHS.
The case highlights the ordeal of thousands of children caught up in the asylum system and raises concerns about Britain's reliance on an opt-out of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which it says is necessary to maintain an effective immigration policy. In 2001 the Government introduced a tougher policy for the indefinite detention of families with children without any formal recognition of the special legal status of children in international law.
In a letter sent to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in September the Strasbourg court has asked Britain to answer 12 questions about the Adedoyin case.
The Government's response to the court concedes that Britain intends to remove both mother and daughter to Nigeria. But Adedoyin's mother says that her daughter does not have the right to live in Nigeria because she was born in America. She says her daughter has a US passport and has lived in Britain with her mother before the mother was first imprisoned for a passport fraud earlier this year and then further detained under immigration rules. Adedoyin's father deserted the family after she was born and is believed to be in Nigeria.
The mother's claim for asylum is based on her membership of a persecuted human rights organisation active in Nigeria, of which her father was a leading member. The mother, who does not want to be named because she fears victimisation in this country and Nigeria, says: "After 10 years I thought I was safe here and now I find myself caught up in a nightmare where I have become separated from my daughter. All I want is to be reunited with her and allowed to continue to live as a family in Britain. What is so wrong with that?"
The family's supporters say the case illustrates the unseen injustice of hundreds of family asylum cases that are rejected by the Government each year.
A parliamentary report published last year found that thousands of people fleeing persecution in their own countries end up victims of a "degrading and inhumane" asylum system.
The MPs also raised concerns about the greater use of detention against vulnerable people such as children, pregnant women and those with health problems.
The Home Office said the Government would not comment on an individual case. But a spokesman added: "We take the welfare of children extremely seriously and would always treat their cases with care and sensitivity. Where families are involved we always make a full effort to keep families together. However, in extremely rare cases families may attempt to use their children to frustrate immigration rules."


Witness appeal to take-away racist attack
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A MASKED man armed with a baseball bat subjected staff at a north Northumberland take-away to a terrifying racist attack.
Police are now appealing for witnesses to come forward, following the shocking incident which happened at Hot Bite on Bondgate Within, Alnwick, on December 21.The man, who had a scarf wrapped around his face to conceal his identity, entered the kebab house and waved the bat at workers, while shouting a tirade of racist abuse.The fracas was caught on CCTV cameras, but police say there were also a number of people in the take-away at the time.Inspector Sue Peart said: "An arrest has been made, but we are very keen to talk to any of the customers who were in the Hot Bite when this incident took place."Anyone with information should come forward, because behaviour like this cannot be tolerated under any circumstances."Anyone with information about the incident can contact Northumbria Police on 0845 6043043 or Crimestoppers 0800 555111.
The full article contains 173 words and appears in n/a newspaper.

Limbo status is made official

The Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, currently going through the Commons, creates a new immigration status for undeportable 'foreign nationals'.
The Home Office's failure to trace the whereabouts of a small number of non-British criminal offenders post-sentence back, in July 2006, led to a rule change in the same month, introducing a presumption in favour of deportation of foreign nationals convicted of criminal offences, save where their deportation would breach the UK's obligations to protect human rights. This change was evidently not draconian enough for the Home Office, which introduced a provision in the 2007 UK Borders Act for mandatory deportation of any foreign criminal sentenced to 12 months' immediate imprisonment for any offence, or convicted of any offence specified by regulations as 'particularly serious'. This might be kicking a phone box, swearing at a policeman or stealing a pint of milk, since criminal damage, public order offences and theft are all designated as 'particularly serious'.
The Stansted hijackers' case
However, there are some 'foreign criminals' who cannot be deported, because of a real risk of torture or other serious ill-treatment back home, for example. The home secretary decided that he did not want to give such 'undesirables' as the Stansted hijackers leave to remain in the country, even though the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal had allowed their appeals against the decision to remove them because of the likelihood that they would be targeted for killing in Afghanistan. He decided he could deal with them simply by not removing them but not granting them any leave to remain in the UK. However, they were very seriously affected by this lack of any status, being unable to work or to receive any support save the sub-subsistence 'hard cases' support under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 s4 (designed for minimal hostel support for those unable to leave the UK).
In their May 2006 judgment on the Stansted hijackers' legal challenge to the Home Office refusal to regularise their status in line with the Tribunal's decision, the High Court ordered the Home Office to grant them leave, saying that the Immigration Act 1971 did not allow for such 'immigration limbo'. The Court of Appeal upheld the decision in August 2006. Now, Part 12 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, which is currently going through the House of Commons, seeks to reverse these decisions by creating a new immigration status for such undeportable 'foreign criminals'.
Provisions of the new bill
The Bill allows the Secretary of State to designate as a 'foreign criminal' anyone who cannot be deported for human rights reasons but who has had a two-year prison sentence (whether in the UK or abroad), or who has been sentenced to any term of imprisonment for a 'specified' offence (including criminal damage, public order offences and theft as well as terrorism, drug trafficking and hijacking), or who is excluded from refugee status under Article 1F of the Convention. These 'foreign criminals' and their families are not to be granted leave to remain but are to have a special 'limbo' status. They may be tagged, required to live in specified places and to report to police or immigration officers, may be prevented from working and required to live on NASS support (accommodation and basic subsistence worth about £35-40 per week), which must not be paid in cash.
These conditions are almost as restrictive as control orders, used against undeportable terrorist suspects, which are known to have profoundly damaging long-term effects on those subjected to them without time limit. The European Court of Human Rights has condemned long-term immigration limbo in a number of cases because of the adverse effects on private life, including rights to work, to move freely, to have access to ordinary social and welfare entitlements and to marry and build a home.
Human rights implications
The government's restrictions on the rights of immigrants to marry in the UK is already the subject of a Court of Appeal declaration of incompatibility with the Human Rights Act (since 2005, only Anglican non-EU migrants and those with fiancé visas or indefinite leave to remain have been able to marry without Home Office approval). But human right lawyers believe that the provisions of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill show that the government has not learned anything from that judicial rebuke. Someone fleeing from torture or civil war who commits one of the specified offences and is sent to prison - whatever the motivation, the gravity or the circumstances - may lose all the security and the rights flowing from a grant of leave to remain, no matter how long they have lived here. For them, not only the punishment of imprisonment, but also the possibility of losing a job, a home and a whole life painstakingly rebuilt, to institutionalised insecurity.
For recognised refugees, this treatment is illegal and contravenes the 1951 Geneva Convention, say refugee law experts. The Convention guarantees refugees rights in the host country which are violated by these provisions. They contain presumptions, which someone is not permitted to rebut, that a designated person has committed a particularly serious crime and is a danger to the community.
Frances Webber is a leading human rights lawyer at Garden Court Chambers.