Flying people to torture and death

A Brighton family was forcibly deported to Algeria last week on an Air Algérie flight from Heathrow. The first attempt to deport them on a British Airways flight three days before had failed, allegedly because there was 'a problem with their tickets.' Both times campaigners from Brighton and London gathered at the airport and leafleted crew members and passengers to try and get them to protest on board, which may explain why the deportation was cancelled the first time. Earlier that week, about 50 Iraqi refugees refused asylum were not so lucky to have 'tickets with problems' or protesters leafleting at the airport. Instead, they were surreptitiously taken through the VIP entrance at Stansted airport and put on a special 'ethnic charter flight' operated by a Czech airline, which carried them to Erbil in northern Iraq. A few deportees were taken off the plane, just before it took off, after last-minute interventions by solicitors and MPs. One deportee was flown back to London after winning a High Court injunction.

Safe as death

Until last week, Assia Souhalia and her husband, Athmane, had been living in the UK for seven years. Their two-year-old daughter, Nouha, was born in Brighton in 2006 and had lived there all her life. Assia fled Algeria in 2002 in fear of her life after her family had suffered years of violence. Two of her brothers were murdered in two separate and premeditated shootings in 1993 and 1994, despite having no involvement in political activities. Upon hearing of the death of her eldest son, their mother suffered a heart attack and died. Since then, Assia's family have repeatedly received death threats and, in 1994, another brother was murdered. In 2007, her sister was badly wounded in a bomb attack. Only one man has been arrested in relation to these murders. Two of Assia's remaining brothers and sisters have also fled the country.

The Home Office's policy of deporting 'failed asylum seekers' to Algeria has been highly controversial, to say the least. In 1997, an Algerian policeman was deported from the UK. Upon arrival at Algiers airport, he was arrested by Algerian security forces and murdered. In 2007, the Appeal Court halted the deportation of three Algerians after judges ruled that the government "could not be certain" that they would be safe from torture.

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