By Frances Harrison –
Frances Harrison
Among a group of about fifty asylum seekers due to be deported from Britain to Sri Lanka on Thursday afternoon is a young woman who’s already been subjected to sexual abuse in custody and has been declared a suicide risk. Doctors who’ve examined the asylum seeker have declared her unfit to travel because of the risk she will try to kill herself again.
The woman, who was a student in Britain, says she was detained on a visit to Sri Lanka in 2011 and taken to a police station in the capital. There she describes being beaten, kicked, striped naked, burnt with cigarette butts several times on her thighs and back and having her head put inside a plastic bag full of chilli powder, before being made to sign a statement in a language she couldn’t understand. She says her interrogators wanted information about members of the Tamil diaspora and her brother who had been a member of the Tamil Tiger rebel group, defeated militarily by the Sri Lankan army in 2009.
Court documents describe this woman as very distressed and tearful, with persistent nightmares. A letter from a forensic specialist confirms she has eight burn marks on her body, which she says were made by the lit cigarettes.
Kulasegaram Geetharthanan of Jein Solicitors, which is representing some of the cases due for return, said among those facing deportation were at least two women and two men who’d been raped as well as another woman who’d suffered sexual abuse.
On Tuesday Human Rights Watch issued a shocking report detailing seventy-five cases of rape in Sri Lanka – mostly by the security forces and significant numbers well after the end of the country’s civil war. Since this data was gathered from among asylum seekers, the likelihood is this only represents the tip of the iceberg since most women are unable to flee the country. Among the cases cited by Human Rights Watch were two Tamils who’d been deported from Britain and then said they’d been subjected to sexual abuse upon return to Sri Lanka.
For more information see ch4 blog & The Independent
Courtesy Still Counting The Dead
dicky Bird / February 27, 2013
Wellcome…. The Military is ready and patiently awaits to rape them again…………….
Why the deportation ? Were they safe in the RC Church they took refuge?
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Lion / February 27, 2013
Fabricated stories to stay in UK has been discoverd by the British government.Send them here nothing will happen to them.They will be taken in to cutody only if they have LTTE connection and involoved in crime.British embassy can moniter this.
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Lion / February 27, 2013
Aunty France has got together with Adela balasingham who calimed the suicide squad of LTTE as great heroes.The story of this lady is nonsence it has no iota of truth.
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Dr.Rajasingham Narendran / February 27, 2013
The attempts to fabricate stories to attain certain objectives has been part and parcel of the conflict and wars in Sri Lanka for a long time. Neither party has been innocent. Asylum seekers too- Tamils (more) and Sinhalese( less ) -have fabricated stories to support their applications. Documents, photographs and videos have been also fabricated , faked or falsified over several decades. These untruths are now casting doubts on what is possibly the truth. Manufacturing truths is an industry today. This is more so when those who were directly or indirectly, parties to the conflict and war, set out on a mission to find what they believe is the truth. The untruths of the past and possibly the present are haunting us. The casualty of course is the truth. Truth has become a relative concept as a result and makes one ask, whose truth or which truth we are seeking? Is it a truth that is convenient to us or a truth that is really the truth, though inconvenient to us, that we are seeking? We are caught in the web of untruths we spun over a long time and yet believe that is the truth. Vested and suspected interests are at play as well. The result is that there is much skepticism and cynicism around.
Dr. Rajasingham Narendran.
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gamini / February 27, 2013
UK is assured of more arms purchases by Sri Lanka. UK’s business interest is more important than Human Rights of Tamils.
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Cliff / February 27, 2013
What a sad story all these T back tigers should be grant homeland in UK.
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kris / February 28, 2013
We don’t want those terrorist in our country , please keep them in uk and you can get done more work from them, more votes for your election
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