Deputy John Kelly has been given permission to raise on the Adjournment the subject matter of a Private Notice Question in his name today which was ruled out of order as a Private Notice Question. Will he please read the question by way of introduction?
Adjournment Debate. - Gambian Stowaway.
I am sorry, Sir. I did not anticipate that you would give me permission to raise on the Adjournment the exact words of my Private Notice Question, which I have not got with me since you ruled it out of order. The substance of it was to ask the Minister for Justice whether he had been made aware of a report on the front page of today's edition of The Irish Times to the effect that a Gambian national is in hospital in Waterford, having been landed from a ship on which he had stowed away; whether, if the report was correct, he would not permit this alien to be deported before he had personally examined his case; and whether in any event he would assure the House that this alien would not be returned to a country in which he might have reason to apprehend violence or death.
I want to make it clear that I have absolutely no information on this case except what I got from the report in The Irish Times and a telephone call I subsequently made to the gentleman who compiled this report on behalf of The Irish Times. He effectively confirmed, in so far as his impressions were concerned, what the report says. The report is to the effect that a Gambian national who had been a recruit in the Gambian army had been, against his will or in circumstances which left him no option, forced to participate in an attempted coup in 1981, since which date he has apparently been a fugitive. He spent some time in the neighbouring country, Guinea-Bissau and in Jamaica and was hoping to get to France.
I know nothing of the detail of this odyssey and I do not know anything about the man concerned or the bona fides or otherwise of his story. I am only concerned about his presence in this jurisdiction, apparently in a bad state of health, although that does not concern us because it is not the responsibility of anybody in this jurisdiction. He is here and I am only concerned that the Minister should assure the House, as I know he would wish to do, that nothing will be done to this wretched stowaway which would ultimately, if not proximately, have the effect of returning him to a country in which, as he assured the reporter, he would either be shot or sentenced to a long period in jail for his part in this attempted coup. I understand that he repeatedly emphasised this point in the presence of the reporter and two uninvolved people from a voluntary charitable agency.
I know nothing about Gambian politics. I do not want to comment on them and do not want to involve the House or the Minister. I certainly would not ask the Minister to take up a position on such a matter. In a country which is so far away from such events it would be unseemly to sit in judgment on their politics; we are so little able to influence political events much closer to home. But at the very least it would be disgraceful if we were to turn away an alien, whatever his provenance or however illegal the means of his immigration here, who had genuine reasons to apprehend being summarily executed or thrown into prison for participation in a political event.
I want to emphasise that there is no potential connection here between the sort of "political offence," the cover of which is sought by fugitives in this territory in extradition cases, and the kind of politics which underlie this man's story. There is no parallel between these cases. I do not believe that any kind of savagery or barbarity is excusable or entitled to defence or protection merely because it was committed with a political or quasi-political motive. I do not believe that is so or that civilised states should acquiesce in such a proposition.
The story this man has given is the only information we have, unless the Minister has additional information from immigration officials. Apparently this man was a relatively passive and certainly unwilling participant in this coup, and he is afraid that his relative or complete lack of guilt — he says he was not involved in killing or anything of that sort — may not count for very much or weigh very heavily before the authorities in his native country, who may commit him to the kind of summary execution of which I think I read details last year when large numbers of people involved in this attempted revolution were shot on a beach.
I do not believe that this State has any obligation to offer political asylum to anyone who claims it. No responsible Government could tolerate such a thing. No Minister for Justice has ever acquiesced in such a proposition. This Minister made an excellent statement two months ago which deserves to be put into the textbooks, and when I get a chance I will put it in a textbook myself, when he outlined the State's position in regard to people claiming asylum. This was in connection with a person who had disembarked without permission from a Russian airliner at Shannon; and he gave details of such cases. He gave a figure which suggested that roughly half of such people were allowed to stay — I think it was seven out of 17 or some such figure — and the rest were sent off again. The Minister is quite right in resisting any suggestion that somebody who arrives here and claims political asylum, saying he is afraid of political persecution if he goes home, should automatically be entitled to stay. I do not think it should be so.
But there should be at least two principles guiding us. I should like to be clear that these principles are recognised and accepted, and the Minister might take this opportunity to reassure the House, and me personally, that this is so. Where somebody puts up a case of his own, a prima facie or an ex parte case which we are not in a position to contradict or rebut, even if we do deport him, at the very least he should not be deported into a situation which will mean his reconveyance to the country in which he is in fear of his life.
I accept that to acknowledge this principle will involve us in expense and nuisance, because we must give the person concerned a chance of making inquiries as to where he might be taken in; I accept that it would be a nuisance, but that is what human rights theory is all about. We have to tolerate this nuisance, not merely for our own nationals but for people of whatever colour or condition. That is what human rights principles are all about. It would be no harm if we lived up to what a growing number of other civilised countries now practice, namely they do not return to the other country, the source of the apprehension, somebody who claims to be a fugitive from it for political or whatever reasons. Political reasons are what the officials in the Minister's immigration section would normally have.
I want to draw the attention of the House to an anomaly. We have a very elaborate extradition procedure which, with minor variations, applies both to people whose extradition is sought by the neighbouring state, and those whose extradition is sought from further away. In that extradition procedure, whichever of those two parts of the world the request comes from, the person whose extradition is requested has a certain range of safeguards, a certain set of criteria, which will prevent his extradition, and these criteria must be applied by a court. That person whose extradition is sought may be himself an illegal immigrant. He may have arrived here illegally, but even if he has arrived illegally, if on the first occasion when he falls under police notice he is taken up by the police because a request for his arrest on an extradition warrant has arrived, he falls instantly within the four walls of the very solid protection based on international practice, human rights and so on, and the judicial standards of this State, which the Extradition Act, 1965, offers. On the other hand, if his arrest has not been sought, if for all we know he is not guilty of offence whatever, and the possibility exists that he is guilty of no offence that we would recognise, mutatis mutandis, as criminal in our law, somebody who is here in these conditions has not got that protection.
This man, this alien, if I understand this story correctly, is an illegal immigrant in the sense that he has not had the consent of the Minister or of the immigration authorities to his presence here. However, the circumstances, which at any rate have been reported, about his journey here are such that you could not call him a culpable illegal immigrant. Apparently he did not try to smuggle himself into the country. The Minister will know more about this case than I do, but as far as the report I am relying on goes, apparently he suffered such ill-treatment or became so physically ill on this voyage that he had to be put ashore at Waterford. It seems that the Customs officials would not even let him on shore until they made sure that he was not suffering from some disease which would be a public danger if he were allowed to land. He is not a deliberate, culpable illegal immigrant aiming to hoodwink the authorities here and get on to Irish soil. This man was in need of hospitalisation. Apparently he had been very badly beaten, he was suffering from exposure and he had had a very bad time. In other words, human solidarity, even if one were not a Christian, let alone living under the high privilege of the Constitution and subscribing to its high philosophy, would lead one to try to help him. He is here, so to speak, in spite of himself as a result, on his own story, of a series of misadventures and misfortunes to himself and his family. We owe it to this man at least if we deport him — I am not pleading that we allow him to stay, because I accept that the State cannot take all comers — to make sure at least that we send him somewhere from where he will not automatically be redeported to Gambia, which, he says, if he is forced to revisit now will endanger his life. Let us at least give him breathing space to give him a chance to look around and see if some quarter of the globe will accept him. That is the least we might do. We are always patting ourselves on the back for our civilised standards and Christian heritage and the way we taught civilisation to barbarians in the rest of Europe, and it is time that in a small particular such as this we lived up to those pretensions.
I have never been clear in my mind about whether decisions to deport aliens who are here illegally or who perhaps initially have been legally here are necessarily submitted to the Minister's scrutiny. It ought to be a matter of principle and practice here that the very drastic powers of our aliens law are operable only on the express personal authority of the Minister. Although I do not want to be taken to express any lack of confidence in immigration officials, who are as conscientious as any other public officials, in cases like this where people's liberties and perhaps life may be at stake, it is important enough to warrant that whatever Minister is there spends some few minutes considering the propriety of deporting somebody.
Finally, let me say that it would be no bad thing and would circumvent a good deal of occasional dispute in this House, if the Minister for Justice each year were to lay before the House a simple statement detailing the names of whatever immigrants, legal or otherwise initially, had been deported from the State in the course of the preceding 12 months, the dates on which they had arrived, the circumstances in which they had arrived, the substance of the story they had to tell, the result of the investigation which the Minister's Department had carried out and the reasons why the Department decided that the person in question could not be permitted to remain. In other words, I am pleading for something which would be at a higher level and, in the administrative sense, a more transparent procedure for the operation of our aliens law. I am not pleading for asylum for all comers or that aliens who arrive here illegally simply seeking asylum should be put in the same category as those whose extradition is sought to answer a charge of a criminal offence. I am merely pleading for what I might call a humane and transparent administrative system in this area.
Limerick East): My Department were first informed by the agents of the ship concerned on 20 November of the presence of a stowaway on a ship due to arrive in Waterford on 25 November.
There is a long-standing arrangement by which stowaways who are refused leave to land under our aliens laws are disembarked at ports and sent to their country of origin by the ship's agents. In the present case the ship's agents agreed to make the travel arrangements accordingly and the Department of Foreign Affairs were asked to make arrangements for providing the stowaway with a travel document. For this purpose an approach was made to the Gambian High Commission in London.
The ship arrived in Waterford on Sunday, 25 November and in the normal way was boarded by Customs and Aliens officials. In the course of an interview with the stowaway, whose English was easily understood, no reference whatever was made to political asylum and no information provided which could reasonably be interpreted as a case for political asylum. The stowaway expressed a wish to remain here but this was refused on grounds which normally apply in such cases, namely, that he was not in possession of the necessary papers and was not in a position to support himself here. However, the stowaway complained of not feeling well and the officials made arrangements for a doctor to examine him as a result of which he was admitted to hospital. As I have said, the gentleman in question has not made a case for political asylum. I understand that a solicitor has contacted my Department about him but neither has the solicitor made any case for political asylum. Should such a case be made, naturally I will consider it.
Perhaps it would be useful if I were to outline what "political asylum" means. The Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees contains a definition of "refugee" which is generally taken to outline the concept of political asylum. It refers to a person because of "well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country".
In the event that an application for asylum is made to me I shall have to have regard to the conditions obtaining in Gambia as well as the case made by the individual. I should, however, like to make two comments. The first is that, on the basis of the interview between the stowaway and the aliens officer, the former gave no indication of being in fear about returning to Gambia. The second is that, while I do not purport to have any expertise as to conditions obtaining in that country my inquiries to date have not elicited evidence which would mark Gambia as a country which is self-evidently a place to which its law abiding citizens, or any class of them, might be afraid to return.
Will the Minister at least assure the House that nothing will be done to deport this man for a couple of days until some matters on which apparently there is a conflict can become clear? I spoke today to the reporter who compiled the report I referred to, and I explained that apparently there was some disagreement about the substance of what he had written, and he was absolutely positive that the man concerned said he was in fear of being shot or imprisoned for a long time if he was sent back to Gambia. Will the Minister assure the House at least that nothing will happen for a few days until we can get this cleared up?
(Limerick East): I will of course give that assurance. As I said earlier, should a case be made for political asylum I will consider it personally.
The Dáil adjourned at 8.55 p.m. until 10.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 28 November 1984.