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UK Home Office cancels flight to deport Kurdish asylum seekers to Iraq
The UK Home Office has cancelled a chartered deportation flight to Iraq that was due to depart from the UK on Tuesday evening (May 31).
Up to 30 Kurdish asylum seekers were facing deportation to northern Iraq in the first flight of its kind for a decade.
Dozens of Kurdish Iraqis had been detained in preparation for the flight. Many the Guardian spoke to were in a state of acute distress because they fear for their lives if they are returned to the country of their birth.
The flight was scheduled to land in Erbil, in northern Iraq, where the Kurdistan regional government is in control.
It is understood that safety concerns played a part in the decision to cancel the flight. It is highly unusual for the Home Office to cancel charter flights.
The UK Foreign Office warns against all travel to Iraq and says there is “a high threat of kidnapping throughout the country including from both Daesh [Islamic State] and other terrorist and militia groups”.
Karen Doyle from Movement For Justice, an organisation that has been campaigning against Tuesday’s charter flight, said: “ The detainees and their families have been put through unnecessary torture in pursuit of headlines and a divisive anti-immigrant agenda.
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“The Home Office likes to blame ‘lefty lawyers’ for frustrating their plans but these plans for mass deportations are expensive, unworkable, largely unlawful and horribly unjust.”
A Home Office spokesperson previously said: “We make no apology for removing foreign criminals and those with no right to remain in the UK. This is what the public rightly expects and why we regularly operate flights to different countries. Individuals are only returned when the Home Office and, where applicable, the courts deem it is safe to do so.
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“The new plan for immigration will fix the broken immigration system and expedite the removal of those who have no right to be here.”
Source: theguardian
