A deportation order for Nigerian asylum seeker Caroline Hurley means effective expulsion for her daughter Abigail, an Irish citizen. Jamie Smyth, Social Affairs Correspondent, reports
IT TOOK just over an hour for Mr Justice John D Cooke to throw out Caroline and Gerard Hurley’s appeal in the High Court last week. The husband and wife had travelled to Dublin from their home in Cork with their 20-month-old daughter, Abigail, to plead for the right to challenge an order to deport Caroline, a Nigerian asylum seeker.
“I expected the hearing to take far longer and for the judge to take the case file away and inspect it. But it was all over very quickly. I don’t know how the judge could have considered all the points so quickly,” says Caroline, who is desperate to stay here with her family but has exhausted almost all legal avenues.
“Any day now the Garda could arrive at my door, separate me from my family and put me on a plane to Nigeria. It is like living with a death sentence over your head,” she says.
Caroline has been here since February 2005, when she claimed asylum. She gave birth to her son, Samuel, that June and began to date Gerard shortly afterwards. They fell in love and moved in together the following year, getting married after another year. Their daughter, Abigail, was born in March 2009.
A few weeks after her birth the Minister for Justice affirmed a decision handed down in November 2005 to deport Caroline to Nigeria.
Gerard Hurley, who has six children from a previous marriage, says he doesn’t know what he would do without his wife.
“There is simply no way I can leave my 14-year-old daughter Megan, uproot myself and move to Nigeria to live with Caroline,” says the Corkman, who has spent this week contacting local TDs to try to get them to lobby Dermot Ahern, the Minister for Justice, for an amnesty. A spokesman for the Justice Department says it does not comment on individual cases.
The Hurleys’ case is one of hundreds of court appeals by immigrants involving their children, who are Irish citizens, that are being fast-tracked through the courts. This year 12 children of Irish citizenship have been forced to leave the State following a decision to deport a parent.
This case is unusual because Gerard is an Irish citizen who may have to say goodbye to his wife and daughter because of Ireland’s tough immigration rules.
Most other cases involve immigrant parents one of whom is legally resident, thereby entitling their children to Irish citizenship, and the other whose visa is running out or whose asylum application has been turned down.
Ireland’s laws seem to be particularly unwelcoming. “The irony in Gerard’s case is that if Caroline had married a citizen of any other European Union state she would have qualified for residency rights in Ireland under the EU freedom-of-movement directive,” says Brian Burns, a solicitor with Burns Kelly Corrigan, who is evaluating whether there are grounds for a new appeal. “This is a clear case of reverse discrimination, whereby Irish citizens have less right to live with their non-EU spouse than other Europeans.”
The partners of other Irish citizens have been deported recently. Christy Ogdeide Ryan, the 52-year-old Nigerian wife of a 68-year-old pensioner, and Henry Olabode, a Nigerian man married to an Irish woman in Athlone, were both deported last March. Unlike the Hurleys, however, neither couple had an Irish-citizen child.
Barely a week goes by at the High Court without a deportation case involving an Irish-citizen child being heard. Last Wednesday a Brazilian single mother asked the court to give her the right to challenge her deportation. Marcia Silvia Oliveria Freitas claims the constitutional and human rights of her two-year-old son, who is an Irish citizen, will be breached if she is deported because he will have to leave his country to live in “dire poverty” in a slum in Brazil.
A key argument in this case is that there is very little scope to challenge deportation decisions in Ireland because there is no independent appeals body for immigration cases. A judicial review in the High Court is restricted to considering narrow points of law in how a decision was taken rather than considering the merits of the decision itself.
Ultimately, the Minister for Justice has the right to deport immigrants even if it results in the removal of their Irish child.
There are concerns among human-rights lawyers and non-governmental organisations that the law is stacked too much in favour of the State.
This is resulting in families breaking up following decisions by a legally resident parent (typically a mother) to stay in Ireland with her Irish-citizen child when her partner is deported to his or her home country, or following the decision to take an Irish-born child away when the parent is deported.
“The policy is very short-sighted,” says Sue Conlan, chief executive of the Irish Refugee Council. “It fails to recognise the importance of the family and the need for stability for the family and their part in wider Irish society. The whole emphasis is wrong and often leads to the effective expulsion of Irish-citizen kids.”
Caroline Hurley has decided she will not leave Abigail behind if the Garda arrive to take her away in the coming days. This means her own deportation order will become a de-facto deportation order for her child.
“I am scared about how she would cope in Nigeria. She is not used to the climate or the conditions, which are tough. But I can’t bear to be parted from Abigail,” she says.
Of course, like all Irish-citizen children forced to leave the country, Abigail is free to return to Ireland when she can.
Given the circumstances of her departure, what type of relationship she will have with her father and her home country is anyone’s guess.
