Justice For Chenai

posted: 24/08/2011

GHT is supporting a campaign for a Zimbabwean woman, Chenai Mudzamiri to stay in the UK.

Chenai fled from Zimbabwe and claimed asylum in the UK after she was brutally imprisoned, raped and
tortured for not actively supporting the ruling party, Zanu PF.  The Home Office have decided that she does not have a case for asylum, so she is at risk of deportation back to Zimbabwe.

Chenai has a well founded fear of persecution if she is returned to Zimbabwe. Deporting Chenai would breach Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits you from returning a person to face torture.

Please send a letter to the Home Secretary, which can be downloaded here.

You can also sign Chenai's e-petition here.

Thanks for your support.

HIV+ Ugandan Refugee Stays

posted: 11/02/2011

A Ugandan refugee with HIV managed to avoid being deported by refusing to board the plane at Heathrow early this week. Jamal Ali Said – who is HIV positive, claims he's gay and has lived in the UK for fifteen years – was due to be sent back to Uganda on Monday evening.

Jamal says he is at serious risk of persecution - potentially murder. His deportation was arranged barely two weeks after the Ugandan gay rights activist David Kato was brutally murdered, following a media campaign there that urged Ugandans to kill gay people.

Speaking from Campsfield detention centre in Oxfordshire, Jamal said he was "very frightened" because of "how they treat you in Uganda if you have HIV, if you are a gay man."

Deportation, despite Supreme Court ruling

According to Jamal’s lawyer, his application for refugee protection was refused, before the Supreme Court made a landmark decision for gay asylum seekers last year. The Supreme Court ruled that gay asylum seekers should be granted refugee status if being sent home would mean they would be forced to hide their sexuality – having to hide your sexuality breaches your human right to live a private life.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision, Jamal’s solicitor made a fresh application for asylum quoting the Supreme Court, but this was also refused.

Credit where credit's due - we have to thank the first woman Supreme Court Justice, Lady Hale (a former Manchester barrister and university law lecturer), for her wisdom and championing of the human rights of refused gay asylum seekers. In a recent BBC4 documentary on the Supreme Court, she talked about this landmark case, the different life perspectives women bring to the courts as judges, and her persuasion of the other judges to agree with her pioneering judgement. 

You can read about this recent BBC4 programme 'Justice Makers' and watch some clips here.  

Uganda Parliament and death for HIV sex 

Homosexuality is punishable by up to 14 years in prison in Uganda, but a bill before the parliament would impose the death penalty on people with HIV who have sex.

Jamal is being held in Brook House Immigration Centre, near Heathrow, while the UK Border Agency decides whether to attempt to deport him again.
 

Source

Proud to Halt HIV Child Deportations

posted: 30/04/2010

It was New Year's Day 2008 when Martin Narey, head of the children’s charity Barnardo’s, opened the letter he had been waiting for. Inside were the names of 63 HIV-positive children and their families who had at last received a reprieve from the British Government. They no longer faced deportation back to Malawi and Rwanda, to an almost certain death.
 

In a candid interview before he steps down as chief executive of the children's charity Barnardo's, Mr Narey told The Independent that the letter was the proudest moment of his professional life.
The 54-year-old former head of the prison service had fought long and hard to keep the children in this country, lobbying Tony Blair to argue that it would be "cruel and inhumane" to return them to die when anti-retroviral treatment in the UK could give them a near normal life expectancy.
 

Behind the scenes
George House Trust and the Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit work closely with Barnardo’s Gregory’s Place to support HIV positive children and their families in NW England remain in the UK. He came to Barnardo's met families and staff from both organisations. We all fed him the facts and harsh realities facing HIV positive migrant children and their families.

Martin Narey instantly grasped the inhumanity of deporting HIV positive children to an early death. He used his unrivalled access to people in power and his passionate commitment to justice and care for children to win protection from removal for 63 children with HIV.
 

Manchester visit sparked action
"On a visit to one of our services in Manchester I met Josephine, a mum whose appeal against a decision not to grant her asylum had just been rejected. Josephine and her son Michael, then 14, were about to be deported to Malawi," he said. George House Trust and the Immigration Aid Unit had given expert evidence and pleaded the family’s case at the immigration tribunal.
 

"Both Josephine and her son were HIV positive. The clinical evidence I was subsequently able to read indicated that without anti-retroviral treatment in Malawi, both would die within months, whereas Josephine's life expectancy here was considerable and Michael's was essentially that of any other 14-year-old. What most shocked, upset and moved me about Josephine was not her quiet acceptance about her own death, but her abject fear over the reality that because she had a radically lower blood count she would die first and leave Michael to die on his own a few weeks or months after her.”
 

Take it to the top
"I went straight from there to the Labour conference in Manchester where I was speaking in a Fabian Debate and I spoke very frankly about what I'd seen. That got me in front of the All Party Parliamentary Group on HIV. That got questions asked at PM's Questions. That got me a meeting with Tony Blair and eventually – and to his enormous credit – a list of more than 60 children, all HIV positive, and their families were given indefinite leave to remain.
 

"The reprieve list, which was sent to me on New Year's Eve and I opened on New Year's Day 2008, was, and I suspect always will be, the best moment of my professional life."
 

Source
 

Deporting - Ignoring Human Rights

posted: 28/09/2009

National governments should reconsider their policies for deporting people living with HIV, Human Rights Watch said in a new report.

The organisation calls on governments, international agencies and donors to ensure that HIV-positive migrants have access to antiretroviral therapy when detained and to ensure that, if deported, migrants are able to maintain access to treatment and care.

The report was co-authored with the African HIV Policy Network, Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe and the European AIDS Treatment Group, and describes cases from a wide range of countries around the world.

International human rights and refugee law has long prohibited deportations to a state where the person deported would be at risk of being subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.

However the authors argue that national deportation procedures are often insufficient or underdeveloped to protect the rights of people living with HIV against return to such conditions. If treatment or social support is inadequate, they believe that this can amount to inhuman or degrading treatment.

The European Court of Human Rights is one of the bodies that has interpreted this human rights obligation in a narrow way, so that if antiretroviral treatment is in principle available in the receiving country and if the disease has not yet reached a terminal stage, deportation would not be considered to constitute inhuman or degrading treatment.

The authors note that in some situations individuals may be deported for reasons that are unrelated to their HIV status. However countries which have restrictions on entry or residence of foreigners with HIV may deport people because of their HIV status alone.

UAE tops for deportations

For example, in 2008 the United Arab Emirates deported 1,518 people infected with HIV, hepatitis B and C, or tuberculosis. Migrant workers are subject to mandatory HIV testing, usually without counselling, and those who test positive are detained, without antiretroviral treatment, and then returned to their country of origin, with no referral system to medical services.

A comparable system in South Korea was successfully challenged in the Seoul High Court on public health and human rights grounds. However mandatory testing for foreign workers remains in place.

South Africa has a large number of migrant workers, mostly from other countries in the region, and while it does not have restrictions on residence based on HIV status, individuals may be deported for other reasons. Human Rights Watch believes that the deportation of people with HIV to neighbouring countries where medical care is inadequate is against both the South African constitution and international treaties.

It notes cases where migrant workers, sometimes co-infected with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, have been left at the border of their home country, without any treatment or referral. The authors say that this can amount to a death sentence.

The United States is also criticised for not ensuring access to treatment either while people are detained before deportation, or at their destination.

The report notes that even if antiretroviral treatment is available in principle in a country, regional unavailability, an individual’s lack of understanding of the health system, language barriers, lack of community ties, waiting lists, lack of second or third-line drugs, and medication shortages can all make treatment unavailable in practice.

3 Steps for governments

The report’s authors recommend that national governments:

• Publish comprehensive information about HIV-positive individuals deported, including the numbers of individuals removed, grounds for removal, and countries to which they are deported.
• Review national standards on deportation of people living with HIV to ensure compliance with international prohibitions on sending individuals to situations where they may face inhuman or degrading treatment.
• Where feasible, contact health authorities and providers in each deportee’s country of origin, devise a plan for continuing to assure care without interruption, and provide a temporary medication supply if necessary.

Speaking at an event to launch the report at the House of Commons in London, Titise Kode of the African HIV Policy Network noted that the report described situations across the world that also had parallels in the United Kingdom.

She called for greater coherence between the policies of the Home Office, the Department of Health and the Department for International Development, and urged the UK government to ensure that deportation or removal did not lead to withdrawal of treatment.

Online edition Returned to risk: deportation of HIV-positive migrants. Human Rights Watch, 2009.

pdf version Returned to Risk: deportation of HIV-positive migrants. Human Rights Watch, 2009

Source

Protection Gaps for Migrant Women

posted: 11/05/2009

The HIV Immigration Project has produced a useful report highlighting the gaps in protection women migrants with HIV still face. The Project brought together three organisations, Positively Women, Asylum Aid, and the International Community of Women living with HIV/AIDS (ICW).

Throughout the Project the case of N v the Home Secretary was going through the courts. This case decided when removing a person living with HIV was a breach of human rights because appropriate treatment would not be available or accessible in their country of origin. The numerous court decisions in this case, as it went all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, has caused a clear protection gap for women living with HIV to appear.

Protection gaps for HIV+ migrant women
To tackle the protection gap the Project asked ICW to find out about treatment and discrimination in women’s countries of origin, and to offer one-to-one advice. Asylum Aid looked for other ways to obtain protection through legal avenues.

In one case [CA v Home Secretary] the Appeal Court ruled that removing a mother living with HIV to her country of origin, where her child would become infected fatally through feeding, was the sort of inhuman treatment prohibited by Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). This led the way for other similar cases where the mother is forced to contribute to and observe the avoidable death of her child.

New ways to improve the immigration situation of some women living with HIV were identified by Asylum Aid. They include:

• Women whose children were HIV positive;
• Women who are HIV positive and where there is no treatment for the woman on return and the HIV negative child could be left orphaned with no one to look after them;
• Women who were granted Exceptional Leave to Remain (ELR), or Discretionary Leave (DL), or Humanitarian Protection (HP), on the grounds of their health prior to the decision in N., particularly if they have been in the UK for some time and have been receiving treatment;
• Women from Zimbabwe (and possibly other countries) who would be discriminated against in treatment, because of their actual or assumed political opinions
• Under Immigration Rule 395C, all women living with HIV who do not have leave to enter or remain will be able to make representations citing their compassionate circumstances, before they are removed, and these will have to be considered before their removal.

Recent developments in case law on Article 8 of the ECHR also provide greater protection against removal for women who have established families in the UK. Applications on these lines will depend upon the facts of each case.

Most women left unprotected against removal

However, the protection gap since the case of N decision still means that the most women living with HIV now have no right to be protected from removal from the UK simply because of HIV. These women will continue to live without formal immigration status in the UK with all the many problems this causes, or they may have to return to countries where the provision of life-prolonging treatments are less effective, not available, or only available at great cost.

‘A positive partnership: The HIV Immigration Project 2003-2009
a joint project by Positively Women, Asylum Aid and International Community of Women living with HIV/AIDS’