The British Government maintains that people being sent out of the country will be safe from harm in Sri Lanka and failed asylum seekers on board those flights will not be ill-treated.
The United Kingdom is set to deport several Sri Lankans in a specially chartered Border Agency flight today. Those being deported include visa over-stayers, a handful of convicted criminals, and dozens of Tamil refugees, who fear they will be horrifically abused when they return to their nation, according to an Asian News International (ANI) online report.
The British Government maintains that people being sent out of the country will be safe from harm in Sri Lanka and failed asylum seekers on board those flights will not be ill-treated.
The London dateline report identified Malar Rajendran as one of the deportees, who is living proof that Britain has sent people to Sri Lanka to be tortured. She first fled her homeland in 2001 after she was arrested and beaten following the death of her husband, a low ranking member of the Tamil Tigers.
She failed to persuade the asylum tribunal that her life was in danger and she was returned to Sri Lanka in early 2009, where after minutes of touching down, she was detained.
"I was taken away at the airport and interrogated for 24 hours. Then I was taken to another place. They started ill-treating me there. I was kicked, punched, they stripped me. I was sexually assaulted and raped," ANI quoted Rajendran as having told The Independent.
Multiple human rights groups have documented cases where those returning to Sri Lanka have been severely tortured. Human Rights Watch has detailed 13 credible cases where failed Sri Lankan asylum seekers from Europe have been returned and tortured since the end of the civil war in 2009, the paper said.
Despite mounting evidence that several Lankan refugees are subjected to assault and ill-treatment for information upon their return, Britain has still given a green light for to the UK Border and Immigration Agency (UKBA) to deport a possible number of over 300 people on chartered flights to Colombo.
(Island)