A Nigerian woman who tried and failed eight times to secure asylum in Britain was finally granted the right to stay after joining a terrorist organisation just to boost her claim.
The judge who gave the 49-year-old woman the right to stay acknowledged that she was not being honest about her political beliefs and had become involved with the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) only “in order to create a claim for asylum”.
The woman, who came to the UK in 2011, joined IPOB in 2017. A separatist group that has been blamed for acts of violence against the Nigerian state, it has been banned as a terrorist organisation by Nigeria but is not proscribed in the UK.
Upper tribunal judge Gemma Loughran ruled that the asylum seeker’s activities on behalf of the group meant she had a “well-founded fear of persecution” under human rights laws due to her “imputed” political opinion.
The disclosure in court documents, seen by The Telegraph, is the latest immigration case in which migrants have used human rights laws to halt their deportation or win the right to live in the UK.
It is the fourth case exposed by The Telegraph this week. Previous examples include an Albanian criminal who avoided deportation after claiming his son had an aversion to foreign chicken nuggets and a Pakistani paedophile who was jailed for child sex offences but escaped removal from the UK as it would be “unduly harsh” on his own children.
On Wednesday, the issues raised by the cases dominated Prime Minister’s Questions, with Sir Keir Starmer branding as “wrong” another tribunal decision that allowed a Palestinian family to come to live in the UK after they applied through a scheme for Ukrainian refugees.
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He said Parliament, not judges, should make the rules on immigration and pledged Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, would work on closing the loophole.
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said the Nigerian case was “patently absurd”.
“This shows judges are inventing new and comically ludicrous interpretations of vague European Convention on Human Rights’ (ECHR) articles in order to allow foreign criminals and illegal immigrants to stay in the country,” he said.
“This is an abuse of the power judges have been given.
“It is clear to me that a radical overhaul of human rights law is needed in order to end this abuse by the judiciary – who have taken for themselves what amounts to legislative powers.”
It follows controversy over some asylum seekers converting to Christianity to boost their cases, or making false claims about their sexuality.
The Nigerian woman, who was granted anonymity, submitted eight different appeals against a rejection of her right to remain in the UK. They ranged from claims under ECHR Article Eight, which guarantees a right to a family life, to assertions she was a victim of trafficking.
They were all rejected over a 10-year period.
In her ninth appeal, she claimed she faced persecution if she returned to Nigeria due to her membership of IPOB and her attendance at its protests, rallies and campaigns. She said protesters at the Nigerian high commission were photographed and potentially watched on CCTV.
She was backed by IPOB’s UK-based medical director, who detailed her roles within the group, although these were not publicly disclosed to avoid revealing her identity.
She told the court she feared being arrested at the airport and “disappeared” if she returned to Nigeria as its government had powers under terror laws to imprison IPOB members. In 2021, in a government crackdown on the armed wing of the IPOB, 115 people were killed, with allegations of suspects being tortured.
Lower tribunal judge Iain Burnett initially rejected her claim largely because of a lack of evidence about her protest activities, which limited any risk of persecution on her return.
He found that she only became involved in IPOB “in order to create a claim for asylum”.
However, upper tribunal judge Ms Loughran overturned Mr Burnett’s decision, despite accepting that the woman’s IPOB involvement was “in order to create a claim for asylum and that it does not represent a true reflection of her genuinely held political views”.
Judge Loughran said there was a “reasonable likelihood” that the Nigerian woman had been identified as an IPOB activist by the country’s security services and would be identified by the authorities on her arrival in Nigeria.
“It is clear from the country background evidence that the security services act arbitrarily and arrest, harm and detain those it believes may be involved with IPOB without conducting an assessment of the extent of their involvement or their motivation,” she said.
“The appeal is allowed on the basis that [the Nigerian woman] has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of her imputed political opinion arising from her involvement with IPOB in the UK.”
