Ay Family - Deportation Stayed    Monday 14th April 2003

Temporary good news!!!

       Removal of the Ay Family from the UK was only stayed by last minute court action.
Their solicitor had to obtain a court order preventing the removal pending a hearing for the case to go to the Court of Appeal, which has now been granted and will be heard in May. The Home Office wanted to have an additional oral hearing before the full Court of Appeal hearing, so it is possible that the Home Office will apply for this and force another hearing this week.

      The Ay family are now back in Harmondsworth, where it all began 9 months ago.

       Many thanks to all those who have been helping to raise the Ay's case but it ain't over yet so please keep faxing and writing.

Sarah Parker,
                          for Ay Family Campaign

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Ay Family - Deportation stayed - but keep on faxing/writing

AY Family update Wed 9 April

Mrs Ay's solicitor has succeeded in getting the date set for the family's removal postponed from this Friday, until next Tuesday 14th April 2003.

This is to give time to ask the Court of Appeal to consider various issues relevant to the case. The issues include whether the principle will be upheld that the authorities should take into consideration the damage to the individuals‚ mental health that will be caused by removal. Several similar cases are waiting to be heard by the Court of Appeal, and we very much hope that the Ays case can be added to this list. The Ays‚ medical evidence is very clear that the middle two children in particular will be damaged by forcible removal to Germany.

But of course a favourable answer cannot be guaranteed, so we would ask people to keep writing to or faxing the Home Secretary (see below), asking him to allow the Ays to stay on compassionate grounds in the event of any final refusal by the courts.

Where possible please also write to your own MP, MSP or MEP and ask them to raise it and do anything they can to help Chris Pond, MP for Gravesend, (the Ays‚ own MP) in his efforts to persuade the Home Office to let the family stay.

Some points that may be useful:

Although the law has now been made very restrictive and may go against the Ays, the Home Secretary should still realise that all the children, and perhaps especially the middle two, Newroz and Dilan, will be badly and perhaps permanently damaged by forced removal to Germany. Why not let them stay and put their lives back together? He knows that they had settled in well at their schools in Gravesend and were making and would make a very positive contribution to society.

What sort of country is it that can ignore these children‚s obvious distress and send them to Germany knowing they will be sent on to Turkey to a life of fear, dislocation and poverty, having been torn away from all the friends they had made here?

What sort of message about this country does it send to Beriwan, Newroz, Dilowan and Medya and their school friends, and indeed to the general public, who are supposed to believe that the British army has gone to Iraq to liberate the Arabs and Kurds who live there, that these four children can be kept in prison for over eight months through no fault of their own, and then sent on to a life of complete uncertainty and constant terror?

Some points raised by the Home Office so far and answers to them:

1) The case should be finally decided in Germany.

But like Britain, Germany often makes it hard for people to get protection, and is known often to return Kurdish people to Turkey, which the Ays are terrified of. Although if the Ays are returned to Germany we will try to find them a good lawyer, the reality is that they will almost certainly be sent to Turkey. The children were born in Europe and have never been to Turkey.

2) The Ays would not be at risk in Turkey anyway.

We would dispute this. Recent human rights reports indicate that persecution of Kurdish people is still widespread. Even the children's Kurdish names put them at risk of persecution.

3) The Ays do not deserve sympathy because they had already applied for asylum and been refused before they came to Britain.

This just shows the hard-heartedness of the Home Office, and how little they care about the desperation of the people who fail in their struggle to get protection in Europe. The system elsewhere in Europe is often harsh and arbitrary, just like the one here.

And as Mrs Ay says: „ If I had rights in Turkey I would live there. Why should the children be punished and damaged because the family's story and their pleas not to be sent to Turkey are ignored ?

You can use or adapt the existing model letter @

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Ay Family Must be Allowed to Stay - one last effort

The Home Office plans to remove the family to Germany this Friday 11th April.

Urgent Action Needed

     Mrs Ay’s appeal against the Home Office’s refusal of her asylum claim has failed.

     Mrs Ay and the children were snatched from home in Gravesend at the end of July 2002 and have been held in Dungavel Removal Centre in Scotland, for over 8 months.

     It is not too late to stop the Home Office deporting the Ays. Their case has become well-known especially in Scotland, and many people are campaigning for them to stay. Please raise the case wherever you can.

     Ay Family Camapaign are asking people to write/fax the Home Secretary David Blunkett or the Minister for Nationality and Immigration, Beverley Hughes, at the Home Office.

Model Letter: copy/amend/write your own version: Download PDF file

And Fax to:    Home Secretary David Blunkett or the Minister for Nationality and Immigration, Beverley Hughes.

Fax: 0207 273 3965 from outside the UK + 44 20 7273 3965

Or write to:
Home Office
50 Queen Anne’s Gate
London
SW1H 9AT

Campaign leaflet 'Ay Family Must be Allowed to Stay'

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Ay Family Must be Allowed to Stay - Urgent Action Needed

Mrs Ay’s appeal against the Home Office’s refusal of her asylum claim has failed, and on 21 March after judicial review the High Court refused to send the case back to be heard by an adjudicator.

The Home Office plans to remove the family to Germany this Friday 11th April.

It is not too late to stop the Home Office deporting the Ays. Their case has become well-known especially in Scotland, and many people are campaigning for them to stay. Please raise the case wherever you can.

Please write to Home Secretary David Blunkett or the Minister for Nationality and Immigration, Beverley Hughes, at the Home Office, 50 Queen Anne’s Gate, London SW1H 9AT or fax them on 0207 273 3965, asking the Home Secretary to exercise his discretion and allow the Ay family to stay here on compassionate grounds. Please quote HO Ref APX/99/953 and send a copy to the campaign (see below).

Background

Yurdurgal Ay, a Kurdish woman from Turkey, and her four children, Beriwan (14), Newroz (12), Medya (7) and Dilovan (11), are fighting deportation from Britain. Her husband Salih Ay was sent back to Germany, supposedly a "safe third country", last year. On 11th May 2002 German officials deported him to Istanbul. Since then there has been no news, and Mrs Ay is very worried about what has happened to him.

Mrs Ay and the children were snatched from home in Gravesend at the end of July 2002 and have been held, mainly in Dungavel Removal Centre in Scotland, for over 8

months. For months the children received useless "education", in Dungavel; now they have a qualified teacher, but she locks the children into the classroom, although they are already in prison! Fortunately they have received solidarity visits from local people and the case has been covered in the Scottish media. There is growing concern that children in particular should be kept imprisoned and miserable for so long. Every application for bail so far has been turned down.

Why Mr and Mrs Ay had to leave Turkey

Mrs Ay said "I am from Diyarbakir. My husband and I were living in Sirnak which was a dangerous area at that time (1988). The soldiers and military police kept coming to our villages and putting pressure on us, coming into the houses and beating us, asking if we supported the guerrillas. Husbands were taken to the police station and beaten. They were also beating the children and women in the houses. We went to Germany."

"For eleven years we lived under a hellish psychological war in Germany. Twice the police came to the house to try to deport us. Once they said to us ‘You are politicians - go and do politics in Turkey’. The children grew up in that atmosphere, and were all affected by it. Also they’ve always heard bad things about Turkey, which is somewhere they’ve never been. Mrs Ay said she had never slept well all the time she has been in Europe, always fearing the police would deport her. She said: "How long am I supposed to go on like this? The children were born in Europe but don’t feel safe. If I had rights in Turkey I would live there."

Despite this, the Home Office wants to deport Yurdurgal and the children to Germany, although the family are terrified of what will happen when Germany deports them to Turkey too. The children had fitted in well here, learning English quickly, and doing extremely well at school in Gravesend for three years before being detained. Their teachers wrote to say how popular the children are, with both teachers and other kids, and what a good contribution to school life they were making, and how shocking it is that the family faces deportation. Friends and teachers are campaigning for them to be allowed to stay.

When the children came to England they felt safer, because there’s usually less hostility to refugees here, and they hoped the British authorities would offer them the protection from persecution that they need. But now the children have been in prison for months and are terrified of the future. The family are very depressed and upset.

Whatever the legal technicalities it cannot be right for the Home Office to wash their hands of Kurdish people here, saying that Germany is safe, when they know full well that Germany does return Kurds to Turkey in spite of the evidence that it is not safe to do so and that people are routinely targetted on return to Turkey. When Salih Ay has been deported and not been heard from, and when all the news suggests that the level of ill-treatment of Kurdish people in Turkey has risen in the last year and is still rising, it must be wrong to send this family to Germany and then to Turkey.

You can contact the campaign:

Ay Family Campaign
c/o NCADC
131 Camberwell Rd
London SE5 OHF
tel: 0207 701 5197

or Haringey Kurdish Community Centre on
0208 880 1804.

Source for this page: Ay Family Campaign

The contents of this page are the sole responsibility of the author/s.

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