Vigil Tonight outside Dept of Justice

national | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday September 03, 2002 13:13 by June Cochlan - USI womensrights at usi dot ie 086 3853550

Students will tonight hold a candle-lit vigil outside the Department of Justice appealing against the deportation of 18-year-old Christina Onasanwo and her family to Nigeria. The family, who have been served with a deportation order, originally fled from Nigeria in 1999 because Christina and her younger sister Bolu were at risk from Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) which had been ordered by the tribal elders.

June Coghlan, Women’s Rights Officer, USI said: “Christina Onasanwo should be celebrating the fact that she has passed her Leaving Certificate and has been accepted to study business studies in Rathmines College of Commerce. Instead, she now faces the horrific prospect of returning to a homeland her family fled to avoid the scourge of Female Genital Mutilation or “circumcision” as it often wrongly referred to as. The procedure can often result in death from bleeding, shock, infection or tetanus. As a result of the impending deportation the girls’ mother, Elizabeth has suffered a nervous breakdown and is now in psychiatric care as she witnessed her sister die from the same procedure.
The only reason she was singled out for this maiming was because the tribal elders decreed so. Now, because of bureaucracy and red tape, Minister Michael McDowell is placing Christina and her six-year-old sister’s lives in danger by issuing a deportation order to the family.
135 million of the world’s women and young girls have been genitally mutilated. Two million are at risk every year, which works out at approximately 6,000 per day. There have been various appeals to Minister McDowell on the matter but he has yet to respond. This is particularly disturbing because at the 1995 United Nations Conference on Women, our Government, along with 189 other governments, signed the Beijing Platform for Action, an agenda of women’s human rights. A key aim was to eliminate all forms of discrimination against the violation of the rights of the girl child.
USI is appealing with Minister McDowell to honour this commitment and reverse the deportation order. If he fails to do so, he would be partially responsible for any harm that would be done to Christina or Bolu if they were forced to return to Nigeria. There is only one fair and reasonable outcome to this - the deportation order must be reversed.”

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