Swedish student’s plane protest stops deportation of Afghanistan national

■ Elin livestreamed her onboard protest which got .5mn hits

Gothenburg, July 25: ( The Guardian) A lone student activist on board a plane at Gothenburg airport has prevented the deportation of an Afghan asylum seeker from Sweden by refusing to sit down until the man was removed from the flight, reported the Guardian.

Elin Ersson, whose Facebook page says she is a student at Gothenburg University, bought a ticket for the flight from Gothenburg to Turkey after she and other asylum activists found out that an Afghan was due to be deported on it, according to Swedish press reports.

As she entered the plane Ersson started to livestream her protest in English. The video received more than half a million hits on Tuesday.

Facing both sympathy and hostility from passengers, the footage shows Ersson struggling to keep her composure.

‘“I don’t want a man’s life to be taken away just because you don’t want to miss your flight,” she says. “I am not going to sit down until the person is off the plane.”

Repeatedly challenged by a steward to stop filming, Ersson says: “I am doing what I can to save a person’s life. As long as a person is standing up the pilot cannot take off. All I want to do is stop the deportation and then I will comply with the rules here. This is all perfectly legal and I have not committed a crime.”

When an angry passenger, who appears to be English, tries to seize her phone, she tells him: “What is more important, a life, or your time? … I want him to get off the plane because he is not safe in Afghanistan. I am trying to change my country’s rules, I don’t like them. It is not right to send people to hell.”

After a tense standoff, during which the airport authorities declined to use force to eject Ersson, passengers broke into applause when the asylum seeker was taken off the plane.

Elin Ersson, whose Facebook page says she is a student at Gothenburg University, bought a ticket for the flight from Gothenburg to Turkey after she and other asylum activists found out that an Afghan was due to be deported on it