Anti-deportation campaigners today held a protest outside the Nigerian embassy in central London to protest against the mass forcible deportation of Nigerian refugees. A joint charter flight carrying more than 20 families, with children as young as one, is scheduled to leave London via Dublin this afternoon.

The protest, organised by the Stop Deportation Network, called for a halt of the 'shameful' flight and an immediate end to all mass deportations. Similar protests are planned by other groups in Cardiff and Dublin.

The protests come in a week when four deportation charter flights are organised by the UK Border Agency, the others being to Aghanistan last Tuesday, Cameroon on Friday and Iraqi Kurdistan early next week.

Juliana Alexandra of the Stop Deportation Network said:
"After many successful campaigns to stop individual deportations, these charter flights present a new set of challenges to those opposed to the Home Office's macabre immigration policy. They are a new tactic which will separate more families, ruin more lives and deny more people their right to freedom of movement."

Many of today's deportees are victims of torture, rape and female genital mutilation. A mother-of-two, who is due to be deported with her two young children and did not want to be identified, claimed she was a victim of violent human trafficking but her injuries have not been examined by a medical expert as her case was "not looked at properly." Another deportee, Sunny Michael, is being deported to Nigeria despite being a Sierra Leone national.

Kenneth Nwose Ubaka, a human rights activist who fled Nigeria in 2005 after being tortured and shot by the Nigerian military police, is among those to be deported today along with two of his children. His wife and their third child were absent when they were detained from their home in Sheffield by the immigration authorities. In a statement received by the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns yesterday, Ubaka said: "My 12-year-old daughter has completely lost her mind and has been put on self-harm watch [in detention]. She has been psychologically tortured having not seen her mother for about 10 days. She is in great fear and has not eaten anything for the past three days."

As one of the 'white list' countries set out in the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, Nigerian asylum applications are almost automatically dismissed by the Home Office regardless of the merits and evidence supporting individual claims. Cases certified as 'manifestly unfounded' under the Fast Track system are often not examined properly and claimants do not have the right to in-country appeal against the Home Office decision. With charter flights, claimants do not even have time or adequate legal representation to seek a judicial review.

Campaigners argue that deportation charter flights amount to 'collective expulsion', which is prohibited under Protocol 4 to the European Convention on Human Rights. The UK government signed the protocol in 1963 but is refusing to ratify it.

-ends-

Notes to editors:

1. The Stop Deportation Network is a newly formed network of groups and individuals around the country campaigning against deportation charter flights.

2. The Nigerian embassy is located at 9 Northumberland Avenue, London, WC2N 5BX. The Home Office is located at 2 Marsham Street, London, SW1P 4DF.

3. Details of the Cardiff protest, organised by No Borders South Wales, can be found at http://noborderswales.org.uk/2009/04/25/ethnic-charter-flight-to-nigeria/ . Details of the Dublin protest, organised by Residents Against Racism, can be found at http://www.residentsagainstracism.org.

4. The Nigeria deportation flight, PVT007, is scheduled to leave from an undisclosed airport to Dublin at 18:00, connecting with PVT008 to Lagos. The Afghanistan flight, PVT008, left Stanstead airport at 19:30 on Tuesday, 28th April. The Cameroon flight, PVT002, is scheduled to leave at 13:00 on Friday, 1st May.

5. Last February, a similar joint flight carried 89 men, women and children to Lagos. 45 were from the UK, more than 37 from the Republic of Ireland and seven from Switzerland and Germany.

6. According to Section 94 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, a "manifestly unfounded" asylum claim is defined as "a claim which is so clearly without substance that it is bound to fail." It is possible, according to the Home Office immigration rules, for a claim "to be manifestly unfounded even if it takes more than a cursory look at the evidence to come to the view that there is nothing of substance in it." The 'manifestly unfounded' certification process is applied automatically to all asylum and human rights claimants that are entitled to reside in the countries listed in Section 94(4) (‘white list’), unless the Home Secretary is "satisfied that a claim is not manifestly unfounded." As of April 2009, the list includes Albania, Mauritius, Ghana (men only), Bolivia, Moldova, Gambia (men only), Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mongolia, Kenya (men only), Brazil, Montenegro, Liberia (men only), Ecuador, Peru, Malawi (men only), India, Serbia inc. Kosovo, Mali (men only), Jamaica, South Africa, Nigeria (men only), Macedonia, Ukraine and Sierra Leone (men only).

7. In its 2009 World Report, Human Rights Watch maintained that Nigerian state security forces "continued to commit extrajudicial killings, torture, and extortion. Intercommunal and political violence, often fomented by powerful politicians, claimed hundreds of lives." The report can be found at http://www.hrw.org/en/node/79250.

8. Article 4 of Protocol 4 to the European Convention on Human Rights states that the "collective expulsion of aliens is prohibited." For more details, see http://conventions.coe.int/treaty/EN/Treaties/html/046.htm.