Erstellt am: 1. 12. 2010 - 16:18 Uhr
When deportation means death
Radio FM4
Excuse my bluntness but its sick to send someone with a life threatening illness to a place where their illness will kill them. But it’s happened here and could happen again any day. Figures are hard to confirm but experts say between 100 and 200 HIV-positive asylum seekers are currently living in Austria and there’s little protection for them under the law. Georg Bürstmayr, a lawyer specialising in asylum issues says in recent years laws protecting asylum seekers from deportation have actually been weakened. “There is a ruling of the European Court of Human Rights which declared such a deportation of a person who suffered from Aids lawful - and there is a ruling of the Administrative Court which followed the Human Rights Court and declared the deportation of an asylum seeker from Austria to Nigeria lawful”, says Bürstmayr. The debate swings around the conditions existing in the country to which the person will be deported and it involves only non-EU countries.
So time for a Reality Check on the legal argument against deporting someone who is HIV positive and whose asylum application has been rejected. The European Convention on Human Rights protects people from degrading and inhuman treatment but only if it’s done with intent. So if an Aids sufferer is deported unintentionally to a country without adequate treatment and dies, that’s ok? Georg Bürstmayr says “well if this person is ill and they don’t kind of have enough places to treat this person well, that’s kind of bad luck”.
For our Nigerian (or others in a similar situation) it could be both bad luck as well as ignorance on the part of the people assessing him. He applied for asylum in 2003 and after five years of waiting was told that neither the Geneva Convention nor his HIV status allowed him to be granted asylum. Appeals are underway but the Asylum court believes that he will receive adequate care in Nigeria. Many reports on Nigeria’s health system cast serious doubt on that. There’s an Aids epidemic in the country and money has to be paid even to access the state health system, let alone the private one. Of nearly three million adult Aids sufferers in Nigeria less than two hundred thousand receive anti-viral treatment. Aidshilfe Salzburg says the person in question has neither money nor family to care for him in Nigeria and, frankly, no hope. Their manager Maritta Teufl-Bruckbauer told a press conference in Vienna this week that his deportation would be a death sentence.
Someone, in an office somewhere, will soon take a stamp out of the drawer, carefully press it on to the ink pad, and then slam it down on a piece of paper. At least that's how I imagine it will happen. What appears on the paper will most likely mean life or death. Think carefully before you pick up that stamp my friend.