5th December 2008

Press Release:
- Over fifty Iraqi Kurds expected to be deported in the next month

- ’invaluable asset’ to the NHS sent back by force last week

- deportation of campaigner prevented by last minute action on Tuesday

Between fifty and sixty Iraqi asylum seekers have been told they will be forcibly deported in the next month. They are currently being held in detention centres across the UK after Kurdistan in northern Iraq has been deemed safe by the Home Office. Recent deportees have committed suicide, been kidnapped and killed in a car bomb.

Forcible deportations back to Kurdistan are becoming more and more frequent. Dr Hussein Ali, whose pregnant wife and son remain in the UK, had worked in the NHS for four years and had been described as ’an invaluable asset’ to the service by senior doctors, was deported last Friday. He is currently trying to evade the political persecution from which he fled before and which killed his brother.

When questioned the Home Office said he had never been granted a work permit and did not have indefinite leave to remain. Dr Hussein has letters from the Home Office approving his applications to work in NHS hospitals, for which he needed indefinite leave to remain. In addition his wife entered the country legally in 2006 and was given a visa because he had refugee status and a legal work permit.

However there has been some, albeit limited, success against them. On Tuesday 2nd December the deportation of Abbas Ali Babakir, an asylum seeker and human rights campaigner was cancelled after a last minute request from John Mcdonnell MP and numerous letters of support from individuals and organisations across the country.

Abbas says:
’I am very glad still to be here – I was in the back of a Home Office van in Heathrow when I found out. Iraq is not safe for me to go back to. Two of my relatives have been killed and my life has been threatened becuase my family guarded a British oil refinery! It’s not over yet though – I’m worried they will try to deport me again and next time I won’t be so lucky.’
He is currently being held in Campsfield detention centre.

Dashty Jamal from the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees says:

’this is happening with frightening regularity. The widespread violence in Iraq and devastation of the public services has created many difficulties for the Iraqi people and the British Government is compounding this misery by deporting people back to the mess it helped to create. The Kurdish authorities and the two major political parties violate human rights on a daily basis. It is not ‘safe’, as the Home Office describes it. It is madness that people who fled their persecution are being sent back to the mercy of the very people who were persecuting them before. We call on all concerned people to take a stand against the Home Office’s increasingly callous stance.’

(ends)