PLANE STUPID
After passengers stop rapist being kicked out, activists launch f ight to halt other deportations
ACTIVISTS are stepping up their campaign to encourage airline passengers to halt the deportation of immigrants – even those being booted out of Britain as criminals.
Members of a group called Lesbians And Gays Support The Migrants last week handed out hundreds of flyers and replaced adverts on the London Underground with posters providing a step-by-step guide on how to hinder removals.
The protesters also accosted passengers at Heathrow airport before posing for a photograph outside the British Airways lounge.
The activists include Darragh Martin, a 40-year-old Irish playwright and children’s author who was awarded a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship i n 2006 to develop his writing in New York.
Others are Chris Hicks, 26, a graduate in English from University College London and Morten Thayson, a Greenpeace activist.
The new campaign follows an incident earlier this year – revealed by The Mail on Sunday – in which the removal from Britain of a Somalian man involved in the gang rape of a 16-year-old girl was halted after airline passengers staged a mutiny demanding his release.
The posters on the Tube encourage passengers to ‘See it. Say it. Stop it’ – a spoof on the British Transport Police’s ‘See It. Say It. Sorted’ anti-terror campaign.
They f eat ure t hree cart oon images. In the first, two Home Office officials are shown manhandling a deportee whose face is etched with pain. Passengers are urged to ‘ask at check-in and look out for a person at the back of the plane with two guards’.
The next depicts an impassioned passenger confronting a stonyfaced flight attendant and suggests passengers ‘talk to the person being deported [and] demand to talk to the pilot’.
The last shows a defiant passenger refusing to sit down despite the demands of a Home Office guard. An instruction beside it reads: ‘Stand up and refuse to sit down.’
Last night, Harry Fletcher, of the Victims’ Rights Campaign, said: ‘In virtually every case, the deportation will be justified because the individual is a foreign national and has committed a very serious crime which left victims traumatised.
‘The process is legitimate and I would encourage these protesters to examine the material facts of the case rather than assume that all cases are unjustified and even illegal – because they’re not.’
A British Airways spokesperson said it was a ‘legal requirement’ for airlines to deport people, adding: ‘Not fulfilling this obligation amounts to breaking the law.’
However, Virgin Airlines bowed to pressure from activists and has stopped helping with deportations following a string of staged interventions by passengers.
In July, a Swedish student filmed herself halting the deportation of an Afghan asylum seeker on a Turkish Airlines flight from Gothenburg to Istanbul.
A month later, a Turkish Airlines pilot refused to take off from Heathrow after campaigners con- vinced him that an asylum seeker on his plane would be beheaded by the Taliban if he was returned to Afghanistan.
A spokesman for Lesbians And Gays Support The Migrants last night said: ‘LGSMigrants is com- mitted to ending deportations. Many people are being deported to places where they may well suffer persecution and severe harm.’
Neither Mr Martin, Mr Hicks nor Mr Thayson responded to a request for comment.