Hi everybody, this isn't Jeff, it's Esther Sassaman (@estherann on Twitter and lapsed blogger at Thingummy). Jeff is in Ireland sans laptop and has graciously allowed me to do a guest post on here, in a personal capacity. So, apologies in advance for my strident prose instead of Jeff's erudite, considered comment.
I'm writing to let you all know about two asylum seekers named Florence and Precious Mhango, who are currently at Yarl's Wood detention centre awaiting deportation at 7pm today (Monday) to Malawi. If they are deported, it is extremely likely that ten year old Precious will be removed from her mother - the only parent she has ever really known - and taken away to live with her father's family.
On an additional, sickly ironic note, the father, who has been quite credibly accused of domestic violence, is now living and working in the United Kingdom!
Even though Anne McLaughlin MSP consulted experts from the Scotland Malawi Partnership and confirmed that Malawian law would support Precious being taken away from her mother, the UK Border Agency detained Florence and Precious on Wednesday. They're to be deported today at 7pm.
Florence and Precious live in Cranhill, Glasgow and have made a wide variety of friends in the community there, particularly at the Cranhill Community Project and St Maria Goretti RC Church. Their supporters have launched a campaign for their release.
We're asking people to email Phil Woolas MP, Minister of State responsible for UKBA detentions, to politely request the humanitarian release of Florence and Precious. His email is public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk
I met Florence and Precious at the UNITY office, an asylum seeker run organisation that helps people who are signing in for their weekly checks at Glasgow's Border Agency office in Govan. I would go there every week with another asylum seeker and her daughter, and this pair were always there helping their fellows, lending emotional support, and sharing food and a bit of joy and fellowship. Florence and Precious are a bit quiet but are both stunningly elegant and fashionable on the very limited budget they receive as asylum seekers. Precious is a remarkable little girl, with a gift for storytelling and art, and has charmed her teachers and school mates. I've been to their home in Cranhill and my favourite picture of hers is one of Jade Goody (with angel wings) kissing Jack Tweed. Doesn't this show you how, er, integrated she is?
Florence and Precious have undergone quite an ordeal in their time here, and have significant trauma. You can read more at Anne McLaughlin's blog, at this BBC article, and at the Facebook group for Florence and Precious.
Now this is an SNP Tactical Voting post, so here's a little politics. As a researcher for Anne McLaughlin MSP, I work in the constituency office of the SNP Glasgow list MSPs. We get asylum seekers coming in off the street every week asking for help, and we and our MSPs listen to their stories, liaise with their lawyers and supporters, and write polite letters to the Home Office asking for consideration of their cases.
Over the last few months, the MSPs have gotten back increasingly curt replies saying that as immigration is a reserved matter, MSPs are not allowed to represent constituents to the Border Agency. In the last week, Anne and other MSPs, including Nicola Sturgeon, have gotten back definitive statements that the UK Border Agency will not be responding to enquiries from MSPs any longer.
All of the MSPs I have spoken to are quite offended by this decision. As one said to me, if an immigrant wishes a friend, colleague, religious leader or even a lorry driver to represent them they should be allowed to do so!
So, in writing to Phil Woolas on Florence and Precious' behalf, hundreds of people from across Scotland, UK and the world are highlighting the importance of this kind of advocacy. We're all a community together, folks.
27 comments:
Good stuff Esther, an actual bona fide post on positive political campaigning rather than the usual silly, knockabout agonising over a Scottish sub-sample.
My email will be on its way to Mr Woolas' inbox in 5mins. Hopefully other readers will also take the time to show their support...
Keep up the good work Esther (and Anne and Stewart and whoever else!). xx
Oh God, not more of this.
You would have thought Nationalists would have learned their lesson after Fatou Felicite Gaye, now a convicted fraudster and liar. John Mason and Christine McKelvie never did apologise to the Scottish people for trying to get such a person to live amongst them.
When will such people learn to keep their noses out of it and leave such matters to the authorities qualified to deal with it and who have all the relevant FACTS at their disposal?
Could it be that UK Border Agency are tiring of witless MSP's jumping on every sob story that comes into their offices? Perhaps if MSP's exercised a little more discretion and intelligence then their occasional requests might be taken more seriously.
Also posted a small missive to go in Phil's ignore-box…
When I had personal objections to the Iraq War I told myself (and others) that we didn't have the facts and should place our trust in those who did. The rest is, and forever will be, history and I resolved not to assume that those in charge always make the right decisions irrespective of whatever relevant facts are at their disposal.
When I had personal objections to the Iraq War I told myself (and others) that we didn't have the facts and should place our trust in those who did. The rest is, and forever will be, history and I resolved not to assume that those in charge always make the right decisions irrespective of whatever relevant facts are at their disposal.
There's a world of difference between the facts over whether a country should go to war or whether an agency should allow someone to remain in the UK. Some perspective, perhaps.
Quite simply there have been too many cases where 'asylum seekers' have sought to plead their case through the media and politicians having had their case legitimately rejected by those who in possession of the full story. It's usually on closer inspection that you discover these stories have more holes in them than Swiss cheese.
If I was working in the Border Agency and having to deal with a large number of people who were basically lying about anything to get their application accepted and then received pious emails from know-nothing politicians, I might get a bit weary with it all, too. I might even send a few curt replies.
Must admit it had crossed my mind that there may be a reason for the deportation. What I don't understand is why Precious must be separated from her mother.
Can Anne not get in touch with Jack McConnell? He must have contacts in Malawi who could help see the girl comes to no harm.
Best of luck to the kid.
I would say MSP's are pretty good at sniffing out chancers as they deal with them all the time.
The asylum system is like any other system which seeks to weed out the deserving from the undeserving - in order to ensure that help gets to those who really need it, you need to make it flexible enough that it will by necessity allow some people to abuse it.
The alternative is to do what Labour are doing and administer it so rigidly that people like this little girl suffer as a result.
But what the hell, it will get them the Daily Mail vote, or so they think.
It is hardly surprising that the Home Office does not want to deal with MSPs on this issue. The Scottish Parliament has a history of standing up for the rights of asylum seekers(yes they do have them as they are actually human beings), with the SNP in particular showing real principle.
The sooner the whole thing is devolved the better.
One further point - Labour have instructed their Officials to remove as many failed asylum seekers as possible. It is a lot easier to track down women and children than young men who tend to disappear. I call that discrimination.
Anon:
The idea that we should have any confidence in the UK Border Agency is beyond funny.
The idea that we should have any confidence in government ministers to do anything other than sort their second home allowance is also laughable.
I wish that the English authorities would butt out of our business.
I shall email as requested, but I suspect that it will take another Joanna Lumley to move this one.
Tris, of course we should have confidence in the UK Border Agency. They were proven utterly correct in the case of Fatou Felicite Gaye - a woman whose case was rejected FIVE times by the agency and was eventually convicted by the courts of fraud - whilst John Mason MP and Christine McKelvie MSP were proven utterly incorrect.
1-0 to the UK Border Agency.
"The sooner the whole thing is devolved the better. "
I cannot think of anything more terrifying given the number of woolly-thinkers and soft touches in Holyrood.
Reporting Scotland would just become one long broadcast about the hardships of asylum seekers.
Thanks, but no thanks.
The frankly disgusting comments on this post show exactly which camp (nationalist/unionist) are the 'petty nationalists'.
And it isn't the SNP.
I'll defend our nation, our community and our borders, Grogipher, and you can take part in a multi-cultural jamboree on your planet.
Deal?
Sounds like a fair deal to me.
Anon:
One correct result! Wow! Give them all a massive bonus and put them in the Lords so they can enjoy their momentary success for the rest of their lives.
Please! What is this Border Agency thing, an agency of the Home Office? Efficient?
Oh stop it, all this laughter is hurting my stomach.
It's one more than the politicians have managed, Tris, no?
One might have thought that being vindicated by the courts and the Ivory Coast authorities might count as evidence that you know what you're doing more than some mealy-mouthed from politicians who don't know anything about the situation.
Obviously not!
Personal experience has taught me to always assume that asylum-seekers are lying until proven otherwise. I've never been let down by this approach, unlike John Mason and Christine McKelvie.
How very cynical, and I must say how brave you are, putting forward these views behind the mask of anonymity.
Reading these posts I can't help but feel most of the people who believe they are rightly being sent back, miss the main point as I see it. The girl is only 10 years old, shes been here since she was about 3 !! How can it possibly be right and humanatarian to send this child back. Irrespective of what truths do or do not lie at the back of her mother's story, the child must surely be seen as an "innocent" bystander, and can we not hold out the hand of kindness and compassion to her ?
"How very cynical"
Tell me about it. I've heard of parents dying seemingly multiple deaths in car crashes, cancer, shot by the army/police/rebels, etc. I've heard of young children supposedly dying leaving the claimant distraught and traumatised. Allegedly.
On closer investigation, I've found these tales to be completely and utterly bogus.
It's a cynical world out there. No nice. Best to keep your eyes open and your wits about you, in my view. Don't have cotton wool for brains. You'd be surprised at the level of deceit some people will go to and you have to assume the worst. It's the only way you can stay sane and do your job in that enviroment, in my experience.
Allan, such pleas to emotionalism get us nowhere. It's pretty much the only tactic left for Florence Mhango as her claim has been rigorously examined and found to be wanting. Her only strategy now is to complain about how terrible it is that the authorities are using their legitimate rights to examine and reject her case. And she decides to use her child as a human shield to protect her from her own deceit.
Aye, it's murky waters, really it is, you don't want to get seriously involved in this stuff as it will depress the hell out of you. Politicians don't know the half of it which is why they should stay out.
"Politicians don't know the half of it which is why they should stay out."
I can't agree.
We elect politicians to represent us, at all levels of society. This includes having a say over who does or doesn't get into our country.
Ah Anon:
Experience has taught me never to trust a government agency working to ever tighter targets.
They lie through their teeth to achieve targets, which in turn so very often mean bonuses.
i'm up for the multicultural jamboree myself :)
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It's not a final appeal! This is mega important. To lodge a faulting of the reasoning of a corruptly incomplete decision, is their absolute automatic right. "The court change" establishes this.
Court change is a common sense name for a massive democratic advance in the nature of law, that nobody has ever tried to refute is real, but is under a wilful media silence. It urgently helps every asylum seeker. It abolishes finality for any legal decision, so it prevents bent decisions being taken that ignore parts of a case's evidence or reasoning.
Since 7 July 1999 all court or other legal decisions are open-endedly faultable on their logic, instead of final. "Open to open-ended fault finding by any party".Its shifting of power in favour of ordinary people ensures that it has been under a media silence. Nevertheless, it's on publicly traceable record through petitions 730/99 in the European, PE6 and PE360 in the Scottish, parliaments.
This follows from my European Court of Human Rights case 41597/98on a scandal of insurance policies requiring evictions of unemployed people from hotels. This case referred to violation of civil status from 13 May 1997, yet the admissibility decision claimed the last stage of decision taken within Britain was on 4 Aug 1995. ECHR has made itself illegal, by issuing a syntactically contradictory nonsense decision that reverses the physics of time, and calling it final. This violates every precedent that ECHR member countries' laws recognise the chronology of cause and effect, in court evidence.
Hence, the original ECHR is now, and since then, an illegal entity, because it broke all preexisting precedent that courts recognise the correct order of time, and it claimed a power of finality to issue decisions whose content is a factual impossibility. But for the original ECHR to lapse in this way, also breaches the European Convention's section on requiring an ECHR to exist. Hence, this section requires the member countries to create a new ECHR that removes the original's illegality. The source of the illegality being left standing was in the claimed power of final decision. Hence, the only way the new court can remove the illegality is by being constituted such that its decisions are final. If decisions are not final, the only other thing they can be is open-endedly faultable.
This requires the courts in the member countries to be compatible with open-ended decisions and with doing in-country work connected to them. Hence, legal decisions within the member countries' courts also cease to be final and become open-ended, in all the Council of Europe countries.
The concept of "leave to appeal" is abolished and judges no longer have to be crawled to as authority figures. Every party in a case is automatically entitled to lodge a fault finding against any decision, stating reasons. These are further faultable in return, including by the original fault finder, stating reasons. A case reaches its outcome when all fault findings have been answered or accepted.
Failed economic chancers should have left years ago. This is political cause the SNP dont like the UK rules on immigration.
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