No right to sanctuary for women fleeing mutilation

Last year, the then Minister of Justice, John O'Donoghue, cobbled up an Agreement with Nigeria to regularise the deportation of asylum seekers to that country. The government didn't seem to know or care that under Sharia law a woman may be stoned to death in punishment of sex out of wedlock, be it rape or otherwise.

Further, it failed to recognise that the practice of Female Genital Mutilation, which is common practice in many regions in Nigeria, violates internationally recognised right of any human being not to be subjected to "torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment". Nigerian law provides no protection whatsoever for those who do not wish to be subjected to undergo this mutilation of their sexual organs.

As a result of this agreement, Minister O'Donoghue could happily proceed with the deportation of Nigerians, many of whom have sought sanctuary in this country. The existence of the Agreement establishes that the Dublin government has no apparent quarrel with the laws and practices in the state of Nigeria, and consequently, once the national identity of asylum seekers is discovered, they can all be shipped off back to where they have allegedly come from.


Angela's case


What this means in practice is horrific. Angela Nwele, who appears this week in the High Court on a bail application, is just one of many cases at issue.

Angela, a mother of five children aged 16, 13, 10 and twins who are 8, has been imprisoned in Mountjoy for over a month. She is being held on foot of a deportation warrant for her and all her family.

Angela has been in this country since 1997, and she and her children were granted leave to stay, on humanitarian grounds, by the previous Minister of Justice, John O'Donoghue, nearly five years ago.

Angela's previous appeal for refugee status was based on the belief that if the family returned to Nigeria, the girls would be forced to undergo Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), a practice which they all regard as a cruel abomination.

When Angela had been in the country for nearly five years, she applied for citizenship. She was turned down, and then, without any apparent review of her continuing right to stay on humanitarian grounds, an order came for her deportation.

At the beginning of October, Immigration police came to arrest her and took her away from her children to be held in prison, pending the implementation of the deportation order. Some days later, Immigration also came to detain her children, who were staying with an aunt and uncle. They took the children to Harcourt Street and after holding them there for the day, after desperate representations to the Department of Justice, the Department eventually decided to release them.

Adama, Angela's eldest girl, aged 18, told how the children had been crying since they took her mother away. "Our home is here, our friends, our schools are here. Why have they taken our mother away?" she asked.

The eldest daughter, Adama, is since reported missing from the family who were looking after the children during Angela's detention. Angela is still missing.

Torture - "we don't think it so".


FGM it is undoubtedly a case of human rights abuse. The refusal to give sanctuary and refugee status to women who flee from FGM is a moral outrage. FGM is a violation of their person, and it is "torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment". It breaches several articles of the Universal Declaration of Human rights, including Articles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

June Coghlan, Women's' Rights Officer of the Union of Students in Ireland (USI), horrified at the inhumanity of successive ministers, asks "would it have been the same if the lady for deportation were a white woman? And would it, after all, have been the same had the case concerned a white man, where in question is the removal of an organ, not the removal of skin"?

She points out that the term 'female circumcision' is a misnomer. "Circumcision is the removal of some consider to be superfluous skin. FGM is what it says, mutilation of women's genitalia."


Beijing - Rights of Women


Some 200 governments signed up to the Beijing Women's Platform in 1995, which named FGM as one of 12 critical areas of concern. The Dublin government's National Development plan for Women, published six years later, does not even see fit to mention the issue. This was despite submissions from many women's' organisations and other groups, including republican ex-prisoners, which called on the government to at least name the practise as contravening human rights.

The preamble to O'Donoghue's agreement with Nigeria states that the two parties, the Nigerian and Dublin governments, desire to "facilitate the repatriation of citizens illegally residing in the territory of one party... and to treat such persons in a manner which is dignified and guarantees their human rights".

Last week, the Nigerian Ambassador appeared before the Select Committee on European Affairs, of which newly elected Sinn Féin TD Aengus ó Snodaigh is a member. The committee were unanimous in their condemnation of the track record of the Nigerian government on human rights. "I have little doubt," says Aengus O'Snodaigh, "that we will not only get the full support of the Technical Group of T.D.s, but also cross party support to end this agreement with Nigeria, and to ensure that further agreements of this kind are not made."

The case is of great importance not only to those many women from Nigeria who have fled their country to avoid FGM, who may not be able to afford to context their deportation at law in Ireland. It concerns some new proposals of Minister Mcdowell.


New Policy


On 28 October, Minister of Justice McDowell announced a new direction he will bring before the cabinet shortly. "Certain countries," including the ten accession states to the EU, will be listed in a formal way as countries Ireland doesn't accept are likely to be oppressive or tyrannical regimes and in those cases there will be "a presumption of manifest unfounded nature" of their claim to refugee status.

The Minister went on to say: "We can't have a system whereby people can invoke a complex legal process with appeals and judicial review and all the rest of it, clogging up the system", when "their case is manifestly unfounded". Asylum seekers whose claims for refugee status are treated as manifestly unfounded have no right to oral hearing of their case, but may only make written application.

There is nothing in the convention on Refugees that states the asylum seeker's fear of persecution must emanate from the state, and not from other majority or even minority groups. McDowell's proposal contravenes the very spirit of the commitments Dublin governments have made down the years to protect the rights of those who flee their homeland for fear of persecution.

The vociferous opposition offered by TDs from the Technical Group of TDs in Leinster House hopefully will deny McDowell as easy a passage as the previous minister had for his proposals to further infringe the human rights of people who look to Ireland to provide protection and sanctuary.