NO DEPORTATIONS TO IRAQ!

Dear friends,

You are invited to attend a working meeting of the Coalition to Stop Deportations at 7pm on Monday 27 March. The venue is Committee Room 2 at Camden Town Hall, Judd Street, which has kindly been booked by Camden Unison in line with its policy of support for asylum seekers, refugees and migrant workers.

There has been a report (see recent NCADC posting) that Tony McNulty, the Minister for Immigration, has just announced that it is "unlikely" that Britain will carry out more forced removals to Iraq. We welcome this news, but we can't rely on such vague statements, and in any case many people, probably several hundred people, who have been refused asylum and made destitute, have been herded on to so-called "voluntary" flights to Erbil /Hawler run by IOM. We need to keep pushing the coalition's demands:

… Stop deportations to Iraq
… Grant protection to all Iraqi asylum seekers and recognise them as victims of war.
… Allow them the right to work or to receive a decent level of benefit
… Immediately release the remaining few Iraqi asylum seekers held in detention

so that more people are not either forcibly deported or feel that they have no alternative but to go back on the IOM flights.
Proposed Agenda

1. Report and discussion on present situation:
returns via IOM
problems faced by asylum seekers here
problems in Kurdistan

2. Reports and discussion on current activities:
Statement
Website
Petition
Local reports
Letters for MPs
Report on meeting with Amnesty
3. Future plans:
Delegation to meet Home Office
Hold conference, hopefully on Sat 29 April, to elect steering committee and build the campaign
Any other ideas

We hope you can come along - if you can't but have any news to report or campaigning ideas to feed in, please email us beforehand. Thanks for your support, to Dashty Jamal (International Federation of Iraqi Refugees) 07734-704742.Email: d.jamal@ntlworld.com or Sarah Parker sarahp107@hotmail.com