Family to continue fight for asylum

FOUR Kurdish children who were deported from the UK to Germany are to continue their fight to win asylum in Britain.

Lawyers for the Ay children, who were held in Scotland until last week, said they will launch an appeal in an attempt to overturn a Home Office refusal to grant them asylum here.

The move came just hours after the children, aged between eight and 14, and their mother were flown from London to Frankfurt.

The Home Office has deported the family because, under international law, Germany must rule on their case as it was the first "safe state" in which they arrived after fleeing their home in Turkey, where many Kurds have reported suffering persecution.

However, their lawyers fear the Germans will repatriate them to Turkey within days, in line with what they claim is the country’s long-standing policy on Kurdish asylum seekers.

Aamer Anwar, a human-rights lawyer, said the fight to secure asylum in the UK for the children and their mother goes on, despite the deportation.

He said: "The message we are sending to Germany is, ‘Please do not treat the children in the same barbaric fashion that the UK government has’.

"We are going to appeal that from Germany on behalf of the children, and we will start work on that today."

The children’s parents, Yurdugal and Salih, fled from Turkey to Germany in 1988. Between them, they have filed five separate applications for asylum in Germany, all of which have been refused. They came to the UK in June 1999, along with their children, Beriwan, 14, Newroz, 13, Dilovan, 12, and Medya, eight. The family applied for asylum, but failed to disclose their previous applications in Germany.

They have since been the subject of a long legal battle which saw Mr Ay deported to Germany last March, then repatriated to Turkey. Lawyers say he has not been heard of since and fear for his safety.

For the past year, Mrs Ay and her children have been housed at the Dungavel detention centre, in Lanarkshire. A final appeal to the Lords for Mrs Ay to be granted asylum ended in failure last week.

After that appeal, Mr Anwar lodged an application for asylum on behalf of the children only, but he said the Home Office refused it on Monday evening.

The Ays were moved from Dungavel, where they had been held for more than a year, to south of the Border in the early hours of Friday.

Mr Anwar is now in the process of contacting members of the German government, the Green Party, Amnesty International and campaign groups.

He said he had spoken to Beriwan after the family landed in Germany and said she had told him that the children were given eight escorts and had no problems getting on to the flight.

He added: "[On Monday night] Beriwan said she was told by a security guard that if she resisted then she could be handcuffed.

"If there were ‘no problems’ with eight immigration officers getting children on to the flight, then I wonder what state the children were in? Were they kicking and screaming? It’s barbaric.

"When I last spoke to her, she was crying and very, very scared about what was going to happen to her mother and to the rest of the family."

Rosie Kane, the Scottish Socialist Party MSP, flew to Berlin yesterday, in an attempt to garner support among German socialists and green politicians. She hopes to meet with German officials to plead with them not to return the family to Turkey.

The Home Office yesterday confirmed that the children and their mother had been deported. A spokesman said that any appeal by the children would be "considered in line with policy".

Home Office officials have refused to give any details of how the family was removed, amid claims by the Ays’ legal team that the Home Office chartered a private jet to fly them to Frankfurt at a cost of 11,500 to the taxpayer.

The case caused controversy in Britain as the children are believed to hold the record for minors being held in an immigration detention centre. Lawyers claim their health has suffered as a result.

The family has attracted widespread support on many levels. However, the Home Office insists it was bound to return them to Germany in line with the Dublin Convention, which governs asylum applications.