Maria and Elizabeth were due to be deported last week on the same plane that removed Leaving Certificate student Olukunle Elukanlo from the country, writes Mary Raftery.
Both are in their early 20s, and both face the likelihood of one of the most degrading tortures imaginable if they are forcibly returned to their native Nigeria.
These are not their real names. Their solicitor has advised them to remain anonymous as they are still going through the legal process, pleading to be allowed remain in Ireland. At the very last minute, he managed to secure a court order to stay their deportation, but it is only a temporary reprieve.
Maria and Elizabeth come from a part of Nigeria where girls and women are routinely mutilated. Their genitals (clitoris and labia) are cut off, often without anaesthetic, and in some cases their vaginas are sown up, leaving only a narrow opening. The reasons put forward locally for this barbaric practice include keeping women pure, enhancing their chances of marriage, reducing their sex drive and risk of promiscuity, and increasing the sexual pleasure of their future husbands.
This form of torture is known as female genital mutilation, or FGM. It is common across Nigeria, according to both the UK Home Office and the US State Department. They cite reports estimating up to 60 per cent of Nigerian women have suffered in this way. However, the Irish bodies adjudicating on refugee applications do not appear to take the reality of genital mutilation seriously. Maria and Elizabeth are not alone in being sent back to meet this fate.
Take the experience of Grace Edobor, outlined recently before the Supreme Court. Grace arrived here in July 2002, and was refused asylum. She stated that she had been subjected to FGM in her native Nigeria, and that she feared that her baby daughter would also be mutilated if they were deported. She had been made pregnant by an older man in Nigeria and was being forced to have an abortion by her family. She had refused and fled. A month after she arrived in Ireland, she gave birth to her daughter, who thus became an Irish citizen.
However, the prospect of an Irish baby being tortured by having her genitals cut off clearly left the Refugee Applications Commissioner unmoved. Grace was turned down, and lodged an appeal with the Refugee Appeals Tribunal. Despite claims of the vast improvement in speeding up the asylum process, Grace is still, over two years later, waiting for a decision.
The Supreme Court found that the member of the Refugee Appeals Tribunal dealing with her case, barrister Joseph Barnes, had failed in his duty towards her through his "inordinate" delay in reaching a decision. The court upheld the decision by the chairman of the tribunal to reassign her case to another member. Grace will now have to go through the ordeal of a hearing on her harrowing experiences all over again.
It transpired in court that Joseph Barnes had built up a significant backlog of cases. Despite this, he was reappointed to the tribunal last January by the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell. Membership of the tribunal is in the gift of the minister and other members include former Fianna Fáil ministers David Andrews and Michael O'Kennedy, and the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Eamon Barnes. Each is paid per case heard, and their earnings are in addition to their private practice.
The Village magazine has recently highlighted one tribunal member, barrister James Nicholson, as the highest earner at the tribunal, taking in €319,770 during a 28-month period from 2000 to 2003, when his colleagues' earnings averaged €128,000.
Nicholson is also identified as rejecting appeals in an overwhelming number of his cases. There have been only "a couple of positive decisions" out of the hundreds he has adjudicated on, according to Frank Brady, head of legal aid at the Refugee Legal Service.
We, the public, are not allowed to know the results of the decisions of the members of the tribunal, how many cases each one rejects or accepts. Not even TDs are entitled to this statistical breakdown, as Michael McDowell has stated in the Dáil on a number of occasions.
With such an opaque system, it is not surprising that there are continuous allegations of inconsistency in the decisions handed down by the tribunal. None of their judgments has been published, even though the legislation permits this, with the obvious proviso that confidentiality of applicants be maintained.
Last November, the Master of the High Court, Edmund Honohan SC, criticised the basis for many of the appeals tribunal's decisions, pointing out that hundreds of them were being challenged through judicial review in the courts at the expense of the taxpayer.
Michael McDowell has made much of the so-called integrity of the asylum system in recent weeks. He might, however, more usefully contemplate the very real terrors to be faced by young women such as Maria, Elizabeth and Grace, should they be deported by a system in which transparency and accountability appear to count for so little.