Tuesday, 03 December 2024 17:09 Written by OASESNEWS
A 13-year-old boy has taken legal action against his UK parents, for “brutally” taking him to Africa where he was enrolled in a boarding school.
The boy, whose identity is protected, contacted the British Consulate and a child welfare organization after his parents took him from the UK to Africa and registered him at an African school before they returned to the United Kingdom without him.
The boy’s legal team argued that his parents “physically and emotionally abandoned” him due to concerns over his potential involvement in gangs in London, an accusation the teenager denies vehemently.
At a hearing that began on Tuesday, Nov. 26, the boy’s lawyers requested a judge order his return to the UK, where he has lived since birth.
However, the boy’s father’s lawyers argued that the decision to send him to Africa was a legitimate exercise of parental responsibility.
Deirdre Fottrell KC, representing the boy, stated that his parents’ actions were driven by the belief that there was no alternative way to address the perceived risks than by removing him from the country.
She added, “The steps that this boy, not yet 14, has taken to try and remedy the awful situation he finds himself in are extreme.”
Fottrell further stated, “There is clear evidence that he is being harmed emotionally, psychologically, and possibly physically in the environment in which he has been placed,” describing the parents’ decision to leave him in such a situation as “extraordinary.”
She emphasized that the boy’s claim of not being involved in any gang was “categorical,” and the risks his parents feared were not a likely outcome should he return home.
The boy was described in court as “very polite and articulate,” with a passion for football and cooking.
According to Fottrell, he was enrolled in a school abroad without warning or consultation with him, under the pretence of caring for an ill relative. Upon arrival, his parents left him there.
Fottrell described the act as “stark and quite brutal,” citing the boy’s reports of “inadequate” food and tuition, as well as mistreatment. She also highlighted that the boy was “patently extremely unhappy” in Africa, finding the experience “humiliating” and stating that his English friends mocked him for being “deported.”
In addition, Fottrell mentioned that the boy’s mother admitted to physically chastising and abusing him while in the UK. The boy is reportedly “upset, confused, and distressed despite acknowledging his imperfections.”
Judge Mr. Justice Hayden, during the hearing, pointed out that the boy was subjected to “incredibly restrictive” measures in the UK, such as having his location monitored through his phone, which he suggested would be “pretty unbearable for most 14-year-old boys and girls.”
Rebecca Foulkes, representing the boy’s father, mentioned that social workers had reported issues in managing the boy’s behaviour before he left the UK.
They noted instances of physical aggression from the mother when trying to manage his behaviour.
Foulkes also shared that the boy had frequently been late to class, stayed out late, and had been suspected of engaging in criminal activities.
The school had concerns about his social vulnerability and had observed him with expensive clothes and phones, while his phone contained pictures of knives and friends holding knives.
Foulkes stated that from the father’s perspective, there had been a clear deterioration in the boy’s behaviour, leaning toward criminal activities.
She argued that the boy’s parents had “real concerns about where he was and who he was with.”
Foulkes further stated that, in her view, “high-quality care and education in a boundary setting” was available in Africa, where the risks the boy faced in the UK were not present. She believed that the boy’s potential would be wasted if he were to return to the UK.
The court also heard that the parents’ decision should be respected, as it was made in their son’s best interest, even if it did not align with his wishes.
The hearing before Mr. Justice Hayden is set to continue at a later date.
The founder of the Nigerians in the UK Community, Oluomo of Derby confirmed the incident in a statement on Thursday, November 21, 2024.A 34-year-old Nigerian man, Ifeanyi Obi, has been found dead in his apartment in the United Kingdom.
A message on the GoFundMe account set up by friends said he suddenly passed away in Birmingham on November 14, 2024.
According to the message, Ifeanyi's last wish was to go back to Nigeria and be with his family.
In the message, the friends sought financial support to help with the repatriation costs to Nigeria and the funeral arrangements at his hometown, Ojoto, in Idemili South Local Government Area of Anambra State.
“Ifeanyi was a 34-year-old hardworking person who had great dreams and ambitions. This was cut short on Thursday 14th November 2024 when he suddenly and sadly passed away in his apartment in Birmingham,” the message read.
"We his close friends have set up this GoFundMe account to help with the repatriation costs to Nigeria and the funeral arrangements at his home town, Ojoto-Anambra state.
"Ifeanyi’s last wish was to go back to Nigeria and be with family. Although the circumstance are different now, we still want to solicit for support to give him a befitting farewell and pay our last respects.
“Ifeanyi Obi would always be remembered for his humour, selflessness, generosity and the profound impact he had on everyone who knew him.
The founder of the Nigerians in the UK Community, Oluomo of Derby, also confirmed the incident in a statement on Thursday, November 21, 2024.
“With deep sadness, we announce the passing of Ifeanyi Obi, who tragically passed away at just 34 on 14th November 2024,” he wrote.
“We are urgently seeking donations to assist with funds to send him home to Nigeria and give him a respectful farewell. Please support by donating through the link below. Every contribution, no matter how small, will be deeply appreciated during this difficult time. Thank you as you donate.”
Thursday, 21 November 2024 12:57 Written by OASESNEWS
Fakana, from Tottenham, north London, says he was held at a police station for three days and was unable to make a phone call or speak with his parents.
An 18-year-old, Marcus Fakana who went on a holiday with his parents could face 20 years imprisonment after he was charged with having s3x with another tourist – a 17-year-old girl, who is now 18.
Marcus Fakana joined his parents for what was supposed to be a short holiday starting August 26, 2024.
While there, he met a girl, 17, staying at the same hotel.
After having s3x, the teenagers made plans to continue their “blossoming” teenage romance when they returned to London, according to Detained in Dubai.
But the campaign group says he is now stuck in Dubai facing decades in prison after the girl’s parents looked through her phone and reported him to the police when they got home.
Fakana claims he did not know the girl was months younger than him when they met. Their relationship would be legal in the UK.
Dubai has only recently legalised out-of-wedlock s3x for tourists but still has a strict Islamic legal system.
“We had a wonderful time together. We really liked each other but she was secretive with her family because they were strict. My parents knew about our relationship but she couldn’t tell hers. She had to meet me without telling them it was to see a boy”, Marcus Fakana told Detained in Dubai.
“When she left, I couldn’t wait to see her again when I got home. Then suddenly, police knocked on our hotel door. They said they were taking me in for questioning but wouldn’t tell me why. I couldn’t imagine what for. I was frightened and my parents were terrified”.
Fakana, from Tottenham, north London, says he was held at a police station for three days and was unable to make a phone call or speak with his parents.
“They were worried sick”, said Radha Stirling, Detained in Dubai’s chief executive who is assisting Mr Fakana. “He was told his girlfriend’s mother had reported the relationship to authorities in Dubai after she had arrived back in London.
“Marcus later found out the mother had looked on her daughter’s phone and found their chats and pictures. She was furious and reported him to Dubai’s police.
“This is clearly a very strict mother to involve police in a private matter that is completely legal in the country where she lives and where the children have grown up. Perhaps she wasn’t aware that she triggered the possibility of a young man of only 18 spending the next 20 years in prison.
“The girl was just a few months younger than Marcus and he didn’t know that at the time. This is not something Dubai should be prosecuting.
“Parents will be scared to take their older teenagers on vacation with them where they could end up losing their lives over behaviour that’s completely legal in their own countries,” added Ms Stirling.
Marcus and his family are calling on Tottenham MP David Lammy for help after he was appointed as foreign secretary in July.
Ms Stirling, a veteran expert witness in extradition cases involving the United Arab Emirates, said: “Mr Lammy is in a perfect position to help young Marcus.
“Dubai police have the power to drop the case against Marcus and let him come home. This is not something we want to do to young people and we ask Mr Lammy MP to convey this message to his counterparts in the UAE.”
Thursday, 21 November 2024 02:55 Written by gistlover
A Londoner shares the story of his Nigerian colleague, Yusuf, who was dumped by his wife, whose law degree he worked tirelessly to support.
The Londoner advised against imposing a woman’s height, particularly when she is beneath your authority.
He mentioned a Nigerian colleague who worked tirelessly at his previous workplace.
A London resident shared the story of his Nigerian colleague, Yusuf, who was abandoned by his wife after he had dedicated countless hours to support her education in law.
The Londoner offered this account as a cautionary tale, advising against the practice of elevating a partner, particularly when there is a significant disparity in status.
He recounted that at his previous workplace, his Nigerian colleague was known for his relentless work ethic, often putting in extra hours without pause.
On one occasion, he inquired about Yusuf’s tireless dedication to his job, questioning why he consistently took on additional shifts.
Yusuf explained that his efforts were aimed at providing for his family and meeting their needs.
However, the Londoner later arrived at work to discover that Yusuf was absent. Upon inquiring about his whereabouts, he learned that Yusuf’s wife had left him after obtaining her law degree.
It was reported that she expressed to him that she no longer considered herself on the same level as him, now that she had achieved her status as a lawyer, while he remained an ordinary man.
The Londoner revealed that this turn of events led Yusuf to struggle with his mental health, ultimately turning to alcohol for solace.
Reacting to the post…
@rick.rich093 said: “Never build a woman! You’re eventually building a better woman for another man!”
The incident occurred on April 22, 2022, during a 40th birthday celebration attended by around 70 people at Goals Sports Bar.
Shola Balogun, a Nigerian-British officer from Bromley Police Station, has been dismissed by the Metropolitan Police Service in the UK.
The man was dismissed for allegedly biting a colleague at a birthday party in Bexleyheath, Kent.
This was revealed during a hearing held from October 21 to 23, 2024, chaired by high-ranking officer Christopher McKay, with panel members IPM Amanda Harvey and Assessor-Detective Superintendent Kirsty Mead.
The incident occurred on April 22, 2022, during a 40th birthday celebration attended by around 70 people at Goals Sports Bar.
According to the hearing document, Balogun and the victim, both stationed at Bromley Police Station, had previously engaged in light-hearted horseplay and maintained a friendly working relationship. However, during the party, an altercation reportedly occurred when Balogun allegedly grabbed the victim’s glasses and then bit him on the face following a heated exchange.
While Balogun denied biting the victim and claimed that removing the glasses was accidental, medical reports confirmed that the victim had sustained a bite wound.
The panel ruled that Balogun’s actions violated police standards, particularly the Discreditable Conduct section of the College of Policing Code of Ethics, which stresses the importance of maintaining public confidence. Despite receiving positive character references from colleagues, including his inspector, the panel concluded that Balogun’s prior disciplinary history and the severity of the incident justified his dismissal without notice.
The panel noted that “the only appropriate and proportionate outcome in this case is Dismissal Without Notice.
“The Panel bears in mind the words of Lord Justice Maurice Kay in the well-known case of Salter v Chief Constable of Dorset [2012] EWCA Civ 1047 when he said, ”As to personal mitigation, just as an unexpectedly errant solicitor can usually refer to an unblemished past and the esteem of his colleagues, so will a police officer often be able so to do.
“However, because of the importance of public confidence, the potential of such mitigation is necessarily limited.
“In the present case, PC Balogun does not have an unblemished past and the previous misconduct proved against him is serious.
“In the present case, he committed a deliberate assault on a colleague without any explanation or justification.
“He humiliated PC Final Written Warning is not appropriate in this case. The only appropriate and proportionate outcome in this case is Dismissal Without Notice.”
Wednesday, 30 October 2024 00:05 Written by OASESNEWS
A court has ruled that a Portuguese robber and drug dealer remain in the UK because allowing him to be deported would upset his mother.
Fabio Indiai used Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights to argue that if he was forcibly removed from Britain it would harm his mother's mental health.
The article protects an individual's right to a family or private life.
In 2021, Indiai was sent to prison for four years and two months for intent to supply class A drugs after police caught him with more than £1,000 of cocaine, MDMA, and ketamine.
Before this, several years earlier in 2012, he had served 18-months in a youth jail for robbery.
He was not deported by the home office in 2014 but after his most recent offences they sought to remove him.
The Times reported that Indiai used Article 8 to challenge the decision and won. The Judge cited the impact on his mother of this decision where he said she was reliant on Indiai for 'day-to-day support.'
Indiai is not the first person to use article 8 to avoid deportation.
In 2021, an Albanian asylum seeker claimed he was the victim of human trafficking and if he was deported it would put him at risk of being re-trafficked.
His case was at first dismissed but when it was escalated from a first-tier immigration tribunal to the Upper Tribunal.
In 2011, the world learned of the secret British policy called Operation Legacy that was implemented in the 1950s. The goal of this policy was to remove incriminating documents from former colonies in the months before each one became politically independent.
Documents that might embarrass or damage the British government, police and military were either secretly removed or destroyed. This policy had an impact far and wide, and was implemented in British colonies throughout the Caribbean, Asia and Africa.
In an age where misinformation is everywhere, Operation Legacy provides us with an instructive example of the repercussions faced when people with power determine what information is available to interpret events of the past.
A TED-Ed explainer on Operation Legacy and how British officials destroyed embarrassing documents or sent them to the U.K.
Kenya: the unravelling of a British lie
We know about Operation Legacy because of a case brought before the British High Court. Five elderly Kenyans accused the British colonial government of imposing a policy of torture and human rights abuses during a state of emergency from 1952-1960 instituted in response to a rebellion against colonial rule.
The case revealed the price many Kenyans paid as they fought against colonialism. At the core of the conflict was access to land. From the beginning of colonial rule in 1895, the British were aggressive in their efforts to displace Africans from their lands. The goal was to reserve the most fertile land for white settlement and farms.
By the 1950s, African resistance became more organized and intense. When the colonial government declared a state of emergency, Kenyans suspected of challenging British colonial rule faced even greater risks. The state of emergency gave colonial authorities a wide ranging set of powers — which included torture and other human rights abuses — to deal with the anti-colonialists.
The propaganda from the period is telling.
A 1955 British news report casting Kenyan anti-colonial rebels as fanatics and bandits.
Privileging the colonizer’s narrative
Many historians of 20th century Kenya — but not all — overlooked or downplayed this colonial policy of violence. Some might argue they should be forgiven as there were no official colonial documents that revealed a British policy of human rights violations in Kenya.
But what happens when the absence of proof is really due to the deliberate removal of evidence?
Others might be inclined to think those historians did not look hard enough. They were only willing to believe the official colonial records even though there were Kenyans alive who could give oral testimony.
For the five elderly Kenyans, the irrefutable evidence was the scars they bore on their bodies. Make no mistake, the human rights violations were extreme. They even included castration. The Kenyans also had their memories. Yet, this mattered little for those historians who privileged official colonial documents above all else.
However, it was the work of historians David Anderson, Huw Bennett and Caroline Elkins that helped turn the court case around. Their research challenged the historical silence on colonial violence during this period.
In court, evidence was presented that colonial documents were deliberately removed and that the testimony of the elderly Kenyans was, in fact, credible. In December 2010, the presiding judge ruled that the British Foreign and Commonwealth office had to release all documents related to the case.
Once these documents were released and analyzed, the evidence was clear. The British colonial government sanctioned extreme abuses. We now know that over 80,000 people were imprisoned without trial and more than 1,000 people were convicted as “terrorists” and put to death by hanging.
Only eight white officers were accused of extreme abuse, and they were all granted amnesty. This includes the officer accused of “roasting alive” one Kenyan.
Shortly after the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was required to release documents concerning the case, an announcement was made in the House of Lords that files were also being held concerning 37 former British colonies. An independent audit revealed there were more than 20,000 files taken from former colonies.
Some files were also slated for destruction, and there is no way to know how many were destroyed.
Instructions given to colonial officials for the destruction of documents found in the U.K.’s national archives.(The National Archives)
Guyana: destroyed documents and a coup
The files that did survive were eventually transferred to The National Archives in London. They are now officially referred to as the “Migrated Archive,” a carefully chosen misnomer. Now that they are in the public domain, we have a better idea about the documents available for other former British colonies.
I am currently working on a project, Chained in Paradise, that explores the impact of Operation Legacy on the Caribbean. When the public was informed about the specific documents in the Migrated Archive, historian Richard Drayton was the first to point out there were no documents for British Guiana, present-day Guyana.
In other words, unlike in Kenya where some documents were hidden, in British Guiana they were all destroyed. Did Britain have things to hide concerning its colonial policies in British Guiana? The short answer is yes.
The Personal net
Approximately one year after Britain declared a State of Emergency in Kenya, it declared another in British Guiana in October 1953; six months after the colony’s first democratic election.
Jagan was accused of being a communist and went to England to protest his removal. However, he and his allies were eventually placed under house arrest.
A British news report on the deposition of Guyana’s Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan.
According to one document I have reviewed from the Migrated Archives, less than one month after Prime Minister Jagan was elected, records in British Guiana were incorporated into a secret system for hiding official correspondence. It was called the “Personal” net.
There are three things we can learn from these records:
1) As soon as British Guiana had its democratically held elections, plans were put in place for high levels of British secrecy. Not only was there to be no transparency, there was also to be high levels of duplicity.
2) Before political independence — in other words, when Britain was on the cusp of losing its political control — documents were to be destroyed so the incoming government would be left in the dark about the tactics of its former British colonizers.
3) The document below suggests that certain colonial records could be destroyed because there were copies in England. To date, no such documents have been released as part of the Migrated Archives. This raises questions about where those documents currently are and if they still exist.
History is about the future
In his book, The History Thieves, journalist Ian Cobain argues that Operation Legacy was implemented so that British colonialism would be remembered with “fondness and respect.” He is right, but there is more to history than what we remember.
The long-term objective of Operation Legacy was to undermine future criticism of colonialism by sanitizing the past. That would make the transition from colonialism to neocolonialism easier as future economic relations with their former colonies would be negotiated without a proper historical understanding of Britain’s motives.
History was a powerful tool of the British empire, and it has been used to maintain unequal relations with its former colonies long after they attained political independence.
Wednesday, 28 August 2024 23:36 Written by Lindaikeji
Telegram founder Pavel Durov was released from police custody in France on Wednesday, August 28 and transferred to court for questioning ahead of a possible indictment, French prosecutors have revealed, days after the Russian-born billionaire was arrested at a Paris airport.
Durov left the anti-fraud office outside Paris in what appeared to be a police vehicle on Wednesday afternoon according to reports and the Paris prosecutor’s office said he would now face “initial questioning and possible indictment” at a court in the French capital.
Durov, 39, was detained at Paris’s Bourget Airport on Saturday on a warrant related to Telegram’s lack of moderation. He was being investigated on charges relating to a host of crimes, including allegations that his platform was complicit in aiding fraudsters, drug traffickers and people spreading child pornography.
Durov’s app, and its lack of content moderation, has also come under scrutiny for its use by terrorist groups and far-right extremists.
He was placed in custody for up to 96 hours, the maximum amount of time someone can be held under French law before being charged.
Durov’s arrest started a row over freedom of speech and caused particular concerns in both Ukraine and Russia, where Telegram is extremely popular and has become a key communication tool among military personnel and citizens during Moscow’s war on its neighbour.
French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday said the decision to bring charges against Durov was “in no way political,” a rare intervention by a French leader into a judicial matter.
Telegram was launched in 2013 by Durov and his brother, Nikolai. The app now has more than 950 million users, according to a post from Durov last month, making it one of the most widely used messaging platforms in the world.
Conversations on the app are encrypted, meaning that law enforcement agencies and Telegram itself can't see what users post.
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