Mixed message on World Refugee Day
Two remarkable things happened on this year’s World Refugee Day. While Sophie Magennis, head of the UNHCR office in Ireland, wrote in The Irish Times of the continued relevance of asylum, another mass deportation to Nigeria took place after many direct provision centres were raided at dawn by the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB). Magennis reminded her readers that 42 million people worldwide ended 2011 as refugees, internally displaced or seeking asylum, and that humanitarian catastrophes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and the DR Congo continue to produce countless numbers of refugees. Though the UNHCR has been working with the Irish Government (some say too closely), Magennis criticised the inhumane direct provision system and advocated a ‘single procedure’ in the determination of asylum cases.
Under the current system, people seeking asylum in Ireland are first interviewed by the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner (Orac) to determine whether they were persecuted on grounds of race, religion, nationality, membership of a social group, or political opinion. Only after this procedure ends may applicants raise their fear of returning home where they may be tortured or killed. Magennis and the UNHCR recommend a ‘single procedure’ to determine both persecution and protection, which she believes the new version of the Immigration Bill due before the Dáil will address.
While welcoming her article, I find it unacceptable that Magennis said nothing about deportations and their cost to asylum seekers’ lives, particularly as World Refugee Day brought another mass deportation from Ireland to Nigeria.
Anti Deportations Ireland (ADI) was informed that a group including women and children were taken from Carriick-on-Suir, Cork and Portlaoise. One case stood out: out of desperation, a woman called Adekemi allegedly tried to harm herself with a knife while she was being taken from her room. After having dragged her outside naked from the waist up, the police reportedly pepper-sprayed her, beat her severely, and handcuffed her in front of young children who were visibly distraught. Reports also state that a scar on her stomach from recent surgery opened and started bleeding while she was being beaten. The woman was then hospitalised, but after a short time she was brought back to the hostel, and together with her three children was taken to the airport by the GNIB for deportation.
ADI’s statement said it was “shameful that these brutal incidents happened on World Refugee Day, while the UNHCR and State elites are attempting to project a tolerant and multicultural image of themselves. In reality, asylum seekers are increasingly affected by ruthless forms of state racism as the story of Adekemi and many others highlight.”
Like other ADI members – and perhaps because at one stage my own family were refugees from Nazi Europe – I am extremely uneasy about deportations, which the Minister of Justice insists are a ‘rational’ part of the asylum process. ADI is a national, multi-ethnic grassroots network of activists, asylum seekers, refugees, community workers, trade unionists, and academics who have come together to campaign against forced deportations and for the abolition of the direct provision system. Our campaign will be launched soon through documenting the human and financial costs of deportations, based on individuals’ personal testimonies.
We aim to raise awareness, organise public events and network with other groups campaigning against deportations, in Ireland and beyond. And we appeal to all concerned citizens and activists to join our campaign against deportations and the direct provision system.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Éireann.
