Schoolgirl Yashika Bageerathi has been deported to Mauritius after British authorities deemed she was safe to return to the country, despite the fact her mother and older sister have been granted asylum in the UK.
There had been a last-minute attempt to stop the deportation last night, after a spokesperson for Yashika’s school, where she was set to take her A-levels next month, released a statement saying that the 19-year-old was ‘very distressed and worried’ by the fact she would be taken from Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre where she was being held, driven to Heathrow and then put on an Air Mauritius flight back to her country of birth.
‘We are outraged this has happened,’ Yashika’s teacher Sarah Hamilton told Channel 4 News. ‘Yashika is emotionally drained and unable to fight further.’ She claimed that the Home Office bought up rows of seats on the flight. And she said that Yashika was accompanied by five security guards who were ‘instructing her not to scream and not to listen to us when she called us.’
The deportation came despite protests from her schoolmates at the Houses of Commons, an e-petition of more than 175,000 signatures, andcelebrity support from the likes of Cara Delevingne, when a Commons Home Affairs select committee ruled there were ‘no compelling and compassionate circumstances’ to keep Yashika in the UK.
The legal problem comes because Yashika, her mother, Sowbhagyawatee Bageerathi and two siblings came to the UK in 2011 seeking asylum from an abusive relative. And under the laws enshrined by the 1951 Refugee Convention, asylum can only be granted if someone needs protection on the grounds of political opinion, race, religion or membership of a particular social group that is under threat. Family disputes don’t count.
Yashika’s mother and school, though, were hoping for a reprieve, given there’s also a law saying that children shouldn’t be deported before exams – and the Mauritian student was weeks away from taking her A-levels. ‘I just cannot believe they would send her back six weeks from her exams,’ her headteacher, Lynne Dawes, told the BBC. ‘Why can’t there just be some compassion and humanity to allow her to stay and do those A-levels?’ The answer is, apparently, because Yashika is 19, she’s not legally considered an adult.
Yashika is said to have asked her mum what she’s supposed to do when she lands – a question that must be impossible to answer. As her headteacher put it: ‘The outcome has made me embarrassed to be British.’
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Picture: PA
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.