In December 2007 the long-awaited judgment of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal case on the Country Guidance for Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was finally published. The case had been underway in one form or another for nearly a year, with every hearing marked by nationwide demonstrations highlighting the danger of deportation to DRC. However, while Congolese people in Britain remain united in their insistence the country is unsafe, the Tribunal did not agree that the existing guidance should be changed. NICKI JAMESON reports.
It is abundantly clear to any observer that DRC is a dangerous place. The country has been ravaged by imperialism and war. According to a recent survey by the International Rescue Committee an estimated 5.4 million people have died as a result of ‘conflict and humanitarian crisis’ since 1998, and up to 45,000 continue to die every month. The supposedly ‘democratic’ election last year of President Joseph Kabila has not brought peace and the east of the country in particular continues to witness killings, rape and plunder on an unprecedented scale. DRC has the world’s largest deposits of copper, cobalt, coltan and cadmium, as well as chrome, timber, tin, rubber, oil, uranium, germanium, diamonds and gold; yet the mass of the people live in absolute poverty, while multinationals steal these resources, using private armies to quell any opposition, secure in the knowledge the international media will never inquire too deeply into what it has labelled an ‘ethnic conflict’.
However the Tribunal was not interested in any of this. Aside from the specific details of the individual who had initially brought the test case, the court was concerned ‘solely with the purely factual issue of what is likely to happen to failed asylum seekers when they arrive at N’Djili airport in Kinshasa and thereafter’.
While focusing on this very specific point, the court accepted all manner of contentions that in themselves render any deportation to DRC an appalling prospect. For example the evidence from an expert witness, which the Tribunal largely accepted as accurate, covered general matters, including: ‘the acute poverty, in which the vast majority of population of 50 million people live on the equivalent of US$0.2 per person per day and consume less than two thirds of the daily calories needed to maintain good health; approximately 70% of the population has little or no access to health care; 1.6 million Congolese have critical food needs; decades of armed conflict have resulted in 3.3 million deaths and have created a serious humanitarian situation with as many as 2.5 million internally displaced persons … The justice system lacks independence from the executive power. The security services do not respect legally binding procedures. All prisoners, to different degrees … are the object of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (whipping, beatings, and torture). Rape of women is common practice in the detention centres. Torture is very common in detention.’
The government barrister con ced ed ‘that for the purposes of this appeal conditions in DRC prisons and detention centres were contrary to Article 3’. Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights outlaws torture and inhuman or degrading treatment and the admission means that it would be a breach of the Human Rights Act to deport anyone who it was reasonably likely would be sent to a detention centre or prison.
The case therefore revolved entirely around whether failed asylum seekers sent back from Britain, other than those facing arrest or persecution for some specific additional reason, would be routinely detained, tortured or raped at the airport itself, or sent to a detention centre where this would take place. The three judges disbelieved all the testimony to the effect that such treatment was the norm, stating that it was not credible and came in the main from people who had left DRC for economic reasons, ‘with the help of illegal migration networks’, exaggerated their own political in volvement in order to claim asylum in Britain, been disbelieved by the authorities, and who now had a vested interest in alleging the mistreatment of failed asylum seekers in order to prevent their own return.
The lawyers in this case have appealed and some attempts to de port people to DRC have been prevented on the basis that they should not go ahead until after the appeal has concluded.
The distinction between political and economic refugees is a false one. Fleeing a regime like that of Kabila, which, backed by imperialism and hand-in-hand with the multinationals that operate in the region, many of them British, both impoverishes and politically oppresses the Congolese people, is both economic and political.
FRFI opposes all restrictions on immigration and will continue to support all initiatives by the DRC community in Britain against deportations, and in particular to highlight the connections between imperialist plunder of Africa by Britain and other western nations and the racist treatment of asylum seekers who flee that oppression.
FRFI 201 February 2008 / March 2008
