Woman in fear of torture to be deported

A LENGTHY legal battle by a Nigerian woman to prevent the deportation of herself and her two daughters on grounds of fear of female genital mutilation in Nigeria ended in failure at the High Court yesterday when it upheld the deportation orders.

The court’s decision means Pamela Izevbekhai, who was arrested in Sligo more than two years ago for deportation after she came out of hiding to see her daughters, faces imminent deportation unless the Minister for Justice grants her application for “subsidiary protection”.

Ms Izevbekhai and her daughters Naomi, 7, and Jemima, 5, were in court yesterday when Mr Justice Kevin Feeney refused to grant her counsel, Mel Christle, the certificate necessary for a Supreme Court appeal against the judge’s decision in January upholding the deportation orders.

However, the judge refused an application by the minister to award costs of the various legal applications against Ms Izevbekhai and directed each side to pay their own costs.

Mr Christle had said Ms Izevbekhai received €108 weekly in payments from the State for herself and her daughters and there was no reality in making costs orders against them.

Last January, the judge dismissed Ms Izevbekhai’s challenge to the deportation orders signed by the then Minister for Justice in November 2005. Ms Izevbekhai had said she had already lost a baby daughter as a result of the “torture” of female genital mutilation in Nigeria and feared for the lives of her other two daughters if deported.

In January 2006, the court ordered her release from Mountjoy Prison. She was brought there after she was arrested in Sligo having spent five weeks in hiding. Her daughters were taken into care earlier in December 2005.

In the High Court in November 2006, Mr Justice Liam McKechnie had granted Ms Izevbekhai leave to challenge the deportation.

Ms Izevbekhai had said she had left Nigeria in January 2005 because she was in fear for her life and for the lives of her infant daughters. Her husband’s family actively practised the ritual circumcision of female children, she said.

Her first daughter died at 17 months from blood loss, which the attending doctor had described as being possibly the result of the traditional female circumcision which he positively diagnosed as having been performed on the baby.

Mr Justice Feeney dismissed arguments that the minister had breached provisions of the EU Convention on Human Rights and the Irish constitution in relation to how he had scrutinised the applicants’ cases.

The judge found the minister’s decision “necessarily involved” his concluding there were no grounds for believing the applicants would be in danger of being subjected to “torture”.