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As Britain Sees a Needy Child

Matt Carr

BOLTON, Jun 10 2011 (IPS) - The British Home Office has ruled that a severely disabled five-year-old girl should be returned to Algeria. The ruling demonstrates just how tough some European governments are getting on immigration.

Rania Abdechakour originally came to the UK in 2008 to stay temporarily with her English aunt Johaina Taleb and her Algerian uncle Moussa in Bolton in the north of England. She came to receive conductive education – a form of physiotherapy that her aunt and uncle paid for privately.

Rania’s health problems were more serious than they originally appeared. First she was diagnosed with quadriplegic cerebral palsy. She then developed epilepsy and was also prone to reflex anoxic seizures that caused her heart to stop beating.

With her mother’s approval, the Talebs applied for her visa to be extended on compassionate grounds for medical assessment and further treatment. The Home Office eventually acceded to this request, and Rania was allowed to stay in the country another six months.

By this time the Talebs had become so attached to their niece that as the end of her extension approached they offered to adopt her with her mother’s consent, and applied for Rania to be granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK. The application was rejected, but the Home Office’s case refusing the application was initially thrown out by a judge on technical grounds. On May 6 however, the Talebs were told that a second rejection had been accepted and that Rania would have to return to Algeria.

The Talebs appealed, and initiated a Facebook petition against the deportation, which had gathered more than 2,500 names within three weeks. UKBA’s refusal is partly based on a 2008 UNICEF report which states that the Algerian government provides free medical care for all citizens, including children with disabilities. The Home Office also argues that the relationship between Rania and her aunt and uncle is not a parental relationship.

These arguments ignore her very specific health needs and the remarkable progress she has made since coming to the UK. Rania now attends a mainstream primary school where her head teacher describes her as “cherished by pupils, parents and staff.” Her transformation is a testament to the medical team that has looked after her, but it clearly owes a great deal to the devotion of her aunt. A former social and health care consultant, Jo Taleb has a two-year-old daughter, but for more than three years she has also cared for Rania as if she were her own child.

Now eight months pregnant she is fighting a rearguard action to stop what she describes as a “death sentence” at an appeal tribunal that may occur anytime in the next few weeks. In a Bolton café she told IPS of her “complete panic” on receiving the Home Office rejection.

The Talebs are convinced that the Algerian health services will not be able to provide Rania with the level of care that she receives in the UK, and Dr Roger Walker Johaina Taleb’s local doctor, agrees. “When you’ve got a young child with multiple medical problems, staying with the same team when she’s struggling with her epilepsy would be sensible,” he told IPS. “It’s wonderful to see the improvement she’s made and I would like that to continue.”

The treatment of children by the British immigration authorities has long been a subject of criticism in the UK. Since 2002 some 450 children have been deported to other European countries under the Dublin system, which obliges asylum seekers to make their claims in the first country they come to. Last year the coalition government announced plans to build ‘reintegration centres’ in Kabul to house Afghan teenagers who had come to the UK to seek asylum without parents or guardians.

Rania is clearly an unusual and exceptional case, but the decision to send a child in such a precarious state back to a country she now barely knows is another sign of the prevailing climate. Rania was not able to understand the Home Office refusal letter which was addressed directly to Rania herself. The four-page letter informs the child that “effective immigration control” is necessary “to protect the wider interests and rights of the public”, and warns of “the damage to good administration and control if a system is perceived by applicants internationally to be unduly porous, unpredictable or perfunctory.”

In February this year the Children’s Commissioner for England declared that “the treatment of vulnerable children in the immigration system is an important marker of our behaviour in a civilised society.” The treatment of Rania Abdechakour suggests that UKBA has other priorities.

For some years now, European governments have regarded the ability to deport or ‘remove’ unwanted or illegitimate foreigners as an essential instrument of immigration control and enforcement. Deportation has now acquired a new political urgency against the background of the Arab Spring.

In April this year the government in Italy claimed that its deportation of 600 Tunisians had had a crucial ‘deterrent effect’ in reducing the numbers of migrants from North Africa. In a speech in Dresden this week German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted that Germany would also continue to deport ‘economic migrants’ from North Africa.

Most European governments avoid describing deportation as a form of deterrence, as Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Interior Minister did, preferring to describe removals and returns as a bureaucratic necessity to ensure the enforcement and compliance of their immigration restrictions. But many governments have used deportation statistics as a political instrument to head off criticism of being ‘soft’ on immigration, and cultivate an aura of toughness and implacability.

This mutually reinforcing dynamic between politicians and the public has contributed to an institutionalised deportation machinery whose callousness and inhumanity is often staggering. In the United Kingdom, the coalition government is still reeling from last week’s response by the xenophobic tabloid press to the news that more than 160,000 asylum seekers whose claims had not been resolved were still in the UK had not been removed. The fact that many of them had been homeless and destitute, in some cases for years, did not inhibit tabloid condemnation of an ‘amnesty for asylum seekers’.