A woman who was arrested in Sligo for deportation after she came out of hiding to see her two children has been granted leave to bring a High Court challenge to the deportation order.
Pamela Izevbekhai said she has already lost a baby daughter as a result of the "torture" of female genital mutilation in Nigeria and fears for the lives of her other two daughters if they are deported.
Last January, the court ordered the release from Mountjoy Prison of Ms Izevbekhai, who had been brought there after she was arrested in Sligo having spent five weeks in hiding. Her two daughters, Naomi (5) and Jemima (3), were taken into care after their mother disappeared following the issuing of a deportation order in December 2005.
Mr Justice Liam McKechnie yesterday granted Ms Izevbekhai and her two children leave to legally challenge the deportation order. He held they had established substantial grounds to bring the challenge.
Ms Izevbekhai had said she had left Nigeria in January 2005 because she was in mortal fear for her life and particularly for the lives of her infant daughter. Her husband's family actively practised the ritual circumcision of female children, a form of abuse known as female genital mutilation, she said.
Her fear was founded on direct threats from her husband's family and also on the past experience of losing her first daughter, Elizabeth, to the practice, she said in an affidavit.
Elizabeth died when just 17 months old from blood loss, which the attending doctor had described as being possibly the result of the traditional female circumcision which he positively diagnosed as having been performed on the baby.
"I am in dread of my girls being subjected to the same punishment and I earnestly believe that my husband's family will stop at nothing to ensure they are circumcised," Ms Izevbekhai said.
Her former parish priest in Lagos supported her belief that it would be unsafe for her or her girls to return to Nigeria, she said. She had not left Nigeria, where her husband and son still live, to better her economic circumstances and her life there was not a deprived one, she also said.
When immigration officers came to arrest her in Sligo last December, she decided on the spur of the moment to leave the premises, such was her fear of being sent back to Nigeria, she said. She contacted a friend to look after her children, who were then taken into care.
She said she was in a state of extreme anxiety at the time that was further heightened by her children being taken into care.
She believed she would have been immediately removed from the State and that she would not have the opportunity to examine whether she had legal recourse.
Ms Izevbekhai said she fled because of her continuing and well founded dread of returning to Nigeria where she believes her girls will be subjected to the torture of female circumcision.
The case will come before the High Court again on November 22nd.