200 Zimbabweans currently detained in UK

The Zimbabwe Times – The British government is holding at least 209 Zimbabweans at its immigration centres and prisons, it was announced Thursday.

The figure was announced in the House of Lords after a question had been raised on the deportation of foreign nationals and the number of them currently held in detention centres and prisons in Britain.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office Lord Alan West of Spithead said the British government had announced in a written ministerial statement on October 29 last year that authorities were looking to normalising the returns policy to Zimbabwe progressively as and when the political situation developed.

According to latest HM Prison Service figures, as at December 18, 2009, there were 209 Zimbabwean nationals in prisons including those in the immigration removal centres, Dover, Haslar and Lindholme.

The 209 included those held on remand, serving custodial sentences or held under the Immigration Act 1971.

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Iraq refuses to accept deportees from UK

The Guardian – Home Office attempts to forcibly deport thousands of failed Iraqi asylum seekers suffered a setback today when it emerged that Baghdad has objected to any “increase in returns”.

The official refusal surfaced in a high court test case , which ruled that an ethnic Kurd should be released after 21 months in immigration detention because there was no likelihood of his being sent back, even in the “medium term”.

The decision by Mr Justice Langstaff may relate only to a single individual – Soran Ahmed, 22, from Kirkuk – but the judgment has exposed the Iraqi government’s reluctance to receive deportees and the difficulty UK officials have persuading counterparts in Baghdad to cooperate.

An internal Whitehall document, read out to the court, detailed how the UK Border Agency is proposing to fly Iraqi officials into Britain so that they can understand and “buy-in” to the deportation process. It also suggested arranging a UK ministerial visit to Baghdad to stress “the importance of returns to Iraq“.

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UK lawyers fight to save nine-year-old boy from deportation to Iran

By Alexandra Topping

Lawyers for a nine-year-old boy set to be removed from the UK tomorrow are urgently trying to stop his deportation.

The Iranian boy, known for legal reasons as Child M, has been locked up in Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire, the UK’s main immigration removal centre for women and families, since he was arrested with his mother and older brother in Manchester this week. They are due to be put on a flight to Iran tomorrow at 6.30pm.

Child M’s mother has been trying to claim asylum, saying her life is in danger if she returns to Iran because photocopied extracts of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses were found in her house and business.

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Cheryl Laws fights deportation

By Miranda Wilson

A young woman is facing deportation to the Philippines, miles away from her partner and young daughter.

Cheryl Laws, who is 29, spends her days at Yarl’s Wood removal centre waiting to find out if she will be next. If her appeal to stay in the UK fails, her family say, she’ll be forced to move thousands of miles away from her 9-year-old daughter, a UK national who lives with her father in Kent. Cheryl, who was born in the Philippines, moved to Malta in 1998 where she met her now ex-husband, who’s British, and had her daughter, Jasmine. They moved to the UK in 2001 and eventually settled in Bournemouth where Cheryl worked as a nurse in a local hospital. Three years later the marriage ended, which is when Cheryl’s troubles began. She started using drugs, became addicted to cocaine and then moved on to dealing, heavily influenced by a new and negative relationship, says her boyfriend Daniel Brookes. In February 2008 Cheryl was convicted of conspiracy to supply a Class A drug and sentenced to five years in prison. This conviction means Cheryl now faces deportation to the Philippines.

‘She was a law-abiding citizen. Her life has been destroyed by the nine months she spent being dragged into a life of drugs. Cheryl did wrong, she knows this. No one’s arguing with this. She was convicted of a crime and has served two-and-a-half years of her sentence,’ says Daniel, who’s leading the fight against Cheryl’s deportation. He says she faces a double punishment simply for not being born in Britain and that as well as serving time in prison at HMP Send she now faces a further sentence: life without her daughter. ‘It will tear the family apart. Her daughter would be absolutely devastated. She’s the one who will suffer from the deportation along with me and my son who has also become close to Cheryl.’

‘She’s a fantastic woman who’s re-educated herself in prison, has a new career as a fitness trainer and has a good relationship with her daughter and me. Why are we being punished? It’s unfair that violent criminals are allowed back into society and she’s being removed when she’s no threat to anyone. She’s been rehabilitated, it makes no sense to send her away. Her life is here. She hasn’t lived in the Philippines for more than ten years.’ Daniel says their only hope is that Cheryl’s right to family life, embedded in the European Convention of Human Rights, will be recognised.

Cheryl was due to be deported on 6 November . A judicial review lodged by her lawyer means she remains in Yarl’s Wood for now. A bail hearing is due to take place on 16 November.

The deportation of foreign nationals with criminal convictions has increased significantly in the UK over the last four years. There were a record number of 5,400 deportations last year, up from 1,000 in 2005. The Home Office figures fall in line with a pledge made by Gordon Brown in 2007 that any foreign national convicted of a crime would ‘be deported from our country’.

Read about the what is happening to foreign national prisoners across Europe in the latest issue of the European Race Bulletin.

Non-Europeans shut out from another 250,000 skilled jobs

EU plans flights to deport illegal immigrants

By James Kirkup

The European Union is drawing up plans to charter its own flights to return illegal immigrants to their home countries.

Under the plan, individual member states would be able to claim seats on planes for rejected asylum seekers they wish to remove.

The EU flights would then make multiple stops in different countries to collect deportees before flying on to their country of origin. The plan for a common EU approach to repatriation flights is set to be approved by an EU summit in Brussels on Friday.

A document due to be debated at the summit shows that Frontex, the EU’s external border agency, would fund and operate the shared flights. The agency will be asked to explore the possibility of “regular chartering…. of joint return flights”, the document says.

Britain is not a full member of Frontex, but helps fund the Warsaw-based agency and UK borders agency staff have been seconded to work for it.

The proposal, drawn up by Sweden, also calls for more joint naval operations between EU states aimed at intercepting the movement of would-be immigrants by sea. There will also be greater dialogue with the Libyan authorities to persuade them to do more to prevent Libyans setting sail for Europe. Some estimates suggest that more than 100,000 illegal immigrants enter the EU every year via the Mediterranean.

Most end up in Mediterranean countries, who are arguing for a “burden sharing” system where each EU state would get a quota of illegal immigrants it had to accommodate. Britain is strongly opposing that plan. Some EU countries are already co-operating on deportation flights.

Earlier this month, Britain and France combined to charter a flight that returned 27 Afghans to their home country. Twenty-four had claimed asylum in the UK and three had claimed in France. The flight sparked French political protests, but the government of Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged to push ahead with tougher immigration policies.On their return to Afghanistan, the deportees were put up in hotels and offered £1,800 to help them resettle.

France last month dismantled “the jungle” at Calais, an impromptu refugee camp for illegal immigrants hoping to enter the UK from France. The two countries have also agreed to establish a new co-ordination centre monitoring illegal immigration, based in Folkstone, Kent.

EU leaders say that a more co-ordinated approach to border control is starting to pay off. Frontex this week said that illegal border crossings into the EU declined by 20 per cent in the first half of the year. However, asylum requests also increased 11 per cent.

1,200 children face deportation

Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai has said he will not grant legal status to some 1,200 children of migrant workers, triggering an anti-deportation campaign led by several NGOs.

The 1,200 are not included in the 2006 government scheme that granted legal status to over 600 children of migrant workers.

“Their parents are using them to gain legal status in Israel… If we do not deport them, migrant workers will continue to exploit the kindness of the state of Israel,” Yishai said.

A clause in most migrant workers’ contracts forbids them from having children in Israel and says pregnant women must leave the country. Many NGOs say the clause is inhumane and draconian.

Nevertheless, an estimated 2,000 children of migrants were said to have been born in the past decade in Israel, according to the Tel Aviv Education Authority.

Some 250 families face deportation along with hundreds of children born in the past three years in Israel, according to activists campaigning for migrants’ rights.

In July, OZ (the new immigration enforcement unit) launched an operation aimed at deporting nearly 300,000 illegal migrants and visa violators, according to Tziki Sela, head of OZ in Israel’s Immigration Authority.

Criticism by some members of parliament, and religious and community leaders, forced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to postpone the deportation of families of migrant foreign workers with children: Due to begin on 1 August, it was halted for three months.

Meanwhile, an official OZ report seen by IRIN on 21 October said 700 migrant workers without children had been deported since 1 June 2009, and 2,000 had “left willingly”.

On 12 October, a parliament committee on migrant workers decided to start deporting children by the middle of 2010 when schools close.

Anti-deportation campaign

Deportations are set to take place despite a “massive” (according to top Israeli officials) anti-deportation campaign led by several NGOs and aid organizations, including Moked, the hotline for migrant workers.

Karen Tal, manager of the Bialik-Rogozin public school in southern Tel Aviv, told reporters some 302 children in the school (out of 784) are up for deportation if Yishai does not change his mind. Tal spoke about the hardships and uncertainty faced by the children since June, when the intention to deport them was revealed.

Sources in the Immigration Authority and the OZ unit told IRIN they had no intention of operating within schools despite the relative ease of detaining children and parents there.

It all looks so much simpler from across the Channel

Tit-for-Tat Deportations Leave Thousands At Risk

By Louise Redvers

More than 30,000 Angolans are stranded in transit camps after being abruptly deported from the Democratic Republic of Congo and there are growing fears of a cholera outbreak as the rainy season begins.

The families – around two thirds of whom had official refugee status in DRC – were booted out earlier this month in retaliation for Angola expelling thousands of Congolese migrants in recent years.

As of October, the U.N. reported 160,000 Congolese ehad been expelled and there are accounts from aid agencies of many women being raped, often in the process of body searches for smuggled diamonds.

An eye for an eye…

Angola began expelling Congolese migrants from its territory in 2003, mainly from the diamond-rich province of Lunda Norte where they were reported to be mining illegally.

As many as 160,000 had been expelled by October this year, amid allegations of mass rape and brutality committed by Angolan border guards.

Those who are deported to DRC, often return just days or weeks later in search of work. While the UN has been monitoring the situation, the welfare of the returnees has been left largely to Catholic aid agencies.

In July, in response to growing concerns about the alleged ill-treatment of the Congolese by border guards, U.N. staff in Kinshasha contacted its counterparts in Angola who relayed their concerns to Angola’s foreign minister Assuncao dos Anjos.

This did not stop the widely-publicised “Operation Clean Up” exercise during which Angola deported more than 2,500 immigrants from the oil-rich enclave of Cabinda in less than three days.

Earlier this month – coincidentally just as DRC started to deport Angolans in retaliation – a team drawn from various agencies including UNICEF, Caritas, the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, the International Organisation for Migration and the U.N.’s mission to the Congo, MONUC, visited the Bas Congo region where most of the expelled Congoloses are deposited and are due to report back on their findings shortly.

Both governments have agreed to stop the deportation. The focus has now turned to the tens of thousands homeless in northern Angola.

“You have the compounding factors of not having latrines and people drinking possible contaminated water and with the rain coming, this is a recipe for disaster,” said Yolande Ditewig, a Luanda-based protection officer with the United Nations Commission for Refugees who returned from the border camps late Monday.

“There is a lack of everything you can imagine, especially food and many people say they’ve not eaten for days.”

The bulk of the displaced are sheltering at the a camp known as Mama Rosa, close to the border town of Luvo, which is 70 kilometres from Mbanza Congo, the capital of Zaire province in northern Angola, but there also are other camps and settlements along the border.

According to Angolan state media, the government is spending $15 million dollars assisting the returnees with shelter, medical care and processing their identity documents. Last Friday the Ministry of Welfare and Social Reinsertion made a direct appeal to the UNHCR in Angola for assistance, particularly for medical kits, cooking utensils and 10,000 tents for the families stuck in the transit camps.

Various agencies, including the International Federation for the Red Cross, the Angolan Red Cross, the International Organisation for Migration and U.N. agencies including UNHCR and the Children’s Fund (UNICEF) have or have had teams in area to assess the needs of the people.

Blankets, soap, mosquito nets, plastic sheeting and other non food items have already been dispatched by road up to the camps and more is expected to follow on specially-chartered aid planes.

While there is an urgent need to resettle people out of the crowded camps where conditions are bad, there is also concern about the social aspect of the reintegration. Two thirds of those rerturning have been away so long they no longer speak Portuguese.

“The family members that are receiving these people are themselves very poor or destitute.” Ditewig warned. “Many do not have the means to suddenly support an extra five or 10 people. The social impact of this process needs to be carefully monitored.”

A number of senior United Nations representatives were due to fly into Luanda on Wednesday to help co-ordinate the multi-agency response.

Uproar as UNHCR “deports” Zim refugees

By Mxolisi Ncube

A recent decision by the United Nations Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to “deport” 131 Zimbabweans from Johannesburg has been met with uproar in South Africa. (Pictured: One of the refugees ‘fooled’ by the UNHCR representatives who has since returned to South Africa.)
The South African province of the mainstream MDC and the Africa Heritage Human Rights Forum (AHHRF), a Johannesburg-based human rights organisation, have both condemned the action and vowed to fight what they termed the abuse of vulnerable Zimbabweans.
According to information made available to The Zimbabwean early this week, the “deported” refugees are part of a group that was relocated from Johannesburg’s Central Methodist Church to various shelters in Rosettenville, in northern Johannesburg early this year.
During the relocation, which was carried out against the will of Bishop Paul Verryn who runs the refugee centre at the church, the United Nations promised to look after the unemployed refugees until a permanent solution was found.

UN short-lived promises
Verryn raised concerns that the refugees would be dumped soon after the leases of the privately-owned shelters expired, but the city of Johannesburg and the UN promised to take care of the refugees, alleging that they had created a health hazard in areas around the church.
The Zimbabweans were moved into the shelters in April this year and lived there for two months, receiving food vouchers from the UN, which also paid for their accommodation.
However, some of the deported refugees, who have since returned, told ***The Zimbabwean that they only received the rations for two months. “We did not get anything in June and were told that we would soon be moved from the shelters, but would not be disengaged from the UN,” said Trust Jumo, one of the affected Zimbabweans.
“The officials told us that they would sponsor us to do some self-help projects and fund us, but only if we agreed to a voluntary return to Zimbabwe.” Having spent most of their South African life in misery, the refugees agreed to the voluntary repatriation, which they thought would give them a new start once they arrived in their home country.
“We were all made to write business proposals, which we handed in to the UNHCR officials who kept coming to the shelters. “We were promised equipment worth about R7 000 each, which we were made to believe was already in Zimbabwe and would be given to us upon our arrival in the country.”
On July 5, after the business proposals had been submitted, the UNHCR organised two buses belonging to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which were used to transport the Zimbabweans to their nearest towns.
“We were told that we would get the equipment and money for our projects from Christian care in both Bulawayo and Harare,” said another Zimbabwean. “Upon arrival at our nearest towns, we were only given R200 and told to visit Christian Care offices for the disbursement of our project equipment.”

Countless fruitless visits
The refugees say that they made countless visits to the Christian Care offices, which bore nothing as they were told that, not only was there nothing for them, but the organisation expected nothing to arrive. “I realised immediately that we had been fooled and, after failing to make ends meet in Zimbabwe, where everything requires foreign currency, yet I was unemployed, I sold my phone and came back here,” said Jumo, who arrived back in South Africa on September 29.
The Zimbabweans say that they had tried to talk to the UNHCR officers who organised their return to Zimbabwe, but no explanation has so far been given.  Edith Tsamba, the AHHRF Director, whose organisation was approached by the about 10 Zimbabweans who are already back in South Africa, told The Zimbabwean that her organisation was trying to find out what really transpired.
“We are still trying to talk to the UNHCR officers in a bid to establish the truth about what really happened,” said Tsamba early this week. “Once we get all the facts regarding the issue, we will then see how we can handle this because it is a very serious matter.”
MDC South Africa chairman, Austin Moyo, who has managed to get audience from a Zimbabwean who was part of the team that assisted in the “repatriation”, condemned the action.
“Before these people left, they were promised several things like computers which they would purportedly use in their businesses, some of which were shown to them before they left, but they were told that these would only be made available to them upon arrival,” said Moyo.

Who is to blame?
“I am actually shocked to learn that they were taken for a ride and as a party concerned about the plight of our people, we will make sure that we get to the bottom of this matter and find out what happened to both the money and the equipment that they were shown.
“At this moment, I am not sure on who to blame for this because we are still investigating the matter to find out whether these things were really what the Zimbabweans were meant to believe they were, or they were just meant to entice them into returning home.
“If the equipment was really theirs, then whoever could have misappropriated it should face the music. We cannot allow the already suffering Zimbabweans to be taken advantage of and exploited in this manner; they have had enough of these tricks.” Efforts to get comment from the UNHCR proved fruitless at the time of going to print, as the two related officials said that they were too busy to prepare an immediate answer.

Source: The Zimbabwean

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