Evrensel: Constitutional Court halts deportation of trans refugees

 

The Constitutional Court halted the decision made by the Denizli Immigration Authority to deport two Iranian refugee trans women.

Source: “Trans mültecilerin sınır dışını AYM durdurdu,” Evrensel, 22 April 2017, https://www.evrensel.net/haber/316838/trans-multecilerin-sinir-disini-aym-durdurdu

The Constitutional Court halted the decision of the Denizli Migration Authority to deport two Iranian refugee trans women with the justification that it could bring about irreparable results. The two Iranian refugee trans women, who were taken into custody by the police on the evening of April 18 because they did not have work permits, were wanted for deportation by the Denizli Migration Authority with the allegation that they “disrupted public safety.”

The Denizli Migration Authority, which did not allow the refugees their right to object to the decision, wanted the deportation operation to take place in the morning hours of March 21 [sic. Article means April], but with pressure from both lawyers and associations doing work related to refugees and rights advocates, the Denizli Migration Authority was forced to suspend the operation.

The refugees’ lawyers Gamze Saymak and Tezcan Çakmak applied to the Constitutional Court and requested that an injunction be issued related to the deportation decision. The Constitutional Court, which evaluated the demand, ruled to temporarily suspend the two Iranian refugee trans women’s deportation.

The following was said in the ruling: “In order to evaluate whether or not there was a serious threat to the applicant’s life or material or spiritual wholeness through a concrete event, a need is felt for more information and documents. Additionally, in the case that the deportation operation were carried out during the period of research, irreparable consequences could emerge. For this reason, the decision has been made to temporarily halt the deportation of the applicant to their country in order for relevant information and documents to be collected and reevaluated.”

REFUGEES SENT TO ISTANBUL

The refugees, who were held at the Denizli Kınıklı Police Station for three days to be sent to Iran, were sent to the Istanbul Silivri Deportation Center without information being given to their lawyers. The Migration Authority denied the lawyers’ request for information, saying “you do not have power of attorney.”

MIGRATION AUTHORITY DID NOT WANT TO MAKE A DECISION

Lawyer Gamze Saymak, who spoke to our newspaper, while criticizing the attitude of the migration authority during this process, said: “Though we said that we had been appointed by the bar, the Provincial Migration Directorate did not give our side any information or documents and did not give us permission to review the file with the justification that we did not have power of attorney. They did not even want to accept the documents related to the case opened at the Denizli Provincial Migration Directorate Administrative Court or the application for injunction we made at the Constitutional Court. Only after much fighting we were able to deliver the documents.”

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.