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 Niki Adams, Robina, and David
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On 29 September, Positive Action in Housing (Glasgow) hosted the Scottish launch of Legal Action for Women's (LAW) life-saving publication: A Self-Help Guide Against Detention and Deportation. The step-by-step handbook puts together information not usually available, so that anyone - asylum seekers and supporters - determined to get protection and justice, can find out how to do it, at any stage. It comes out of years of intensive work with women seeking asylum, many of whom are mothers and rape survivors – women who spearhead a largely hidden movement against sadistic immigration laws, and in defence of everyone's human rights, starting with the right to life.
Chaired by David Reilly, PAIH, the lively gathering brought together a range of people working for asylum rights, including women from Sierra Leonne who had recently used the Guide to stop a deportation as well as church activists, detention visitors, and other campaigners.
Robina Qureshi, founder of PAIH, welcomed the Guide as essential and urgently needed. The context of the meeting was news of the heart-breaking deportation of the Vucaj family, after an intensive campaign which had won wide support from many in the community, including from the children’s school friends. Campaigners had won a meeting with Parliament’s First Minister, Jack McConnell, who afterwards issued a statement condemning the UK’s “scandalous immigration practices” which “blatantly disregard children’s rights.” Ms Quershi connected “Nazi style” immigration policies, with the brutal expulsion from the Labory Party conference of an 82 year old holocaust survivor who spoke against the Iraq war. Everyone agreed it was urgent to keep up the pressure for the Vacaj family to be returned.
Niki Adams from Legal Action for Women gave a history of how the Guide came into being and the overwhelmingly response from women in detention who because of the non-existent legal help, were desperate for information to prevent their deportation. Groups and individuals from church and community groups all over the UK had also got in touch for copies revealing a national grassroots movement of people determined to defend asylum seekers rights. Acknowledging that she was speaking to an audience of people who were themselves active in defence of asylum seekers and therefore interested in how to be most effective, Ms Adams spoke of how organising together on the basis of self-help help prevents people being separated into do-gooders and poor victims and avoids the racism and elitism of people who have passports and social power dictating to those that don’t. It is also the most precise and effective way to do legal work. Ms Adams described how working with Black Women’s Rape Action Project and Women Against Rape, LAW had discovered that eighty percent of the women in detention are rape survivors.
Sarah Kajjumba from the All African Women’s Group spoke eloquently about how their group, from over a dozen countries, had formed at Crossroads Women’s Centre, after many had been turned away by asylum charities funded to help asylum seekers. She talked about the successes: winning resources and supporting a hunger strike by Ugandan women in Yarls’ Wood Removal Centre, as well as problems – lack of translation, coping with ill-health, the tendency to focus on one’s own case. She highlighted how collective working were crucial in women getting together across different nationalities and strengthening networks defending asylum seekers’ rights.
There was discussion about how to distribute the Guide, the urgent need for translations into other languages, and the role of detention visitors. Women asylum seekers and other women of colour spoke passionately about the need for more than sympathy; for asylum seekers to be listened to and asked that people consider what action they would take if it was their sister, mother or loved one whose life was on the line.
For more information contact:
· David Reilly Positive Action in Housing Tel: 0141 353 2220 email: david@paih.org
· Niki Adams, Legal Action for Women Tel: 0207 482 2496 email: law@crossroadswomen.net