Dignity for Mister D, Papers for Ali B.

On 2 May, Mister D won his deportation appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. Mister D, a 37-year-old man from the Caribbean island of St Kitts, arrived in Great Britain in January 1993. Customs claim to have found him carrying a substantial amount of cocaine. Four months later, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced on 10 May 1993 to six years’ imprisonment.

In August 1994, while in prison, Mister D suffered an attack of PCP pneumonia. An HIV test came back positive. Mister D learned he was suffering from AIDS.

In January 1996, he was placed in immigration detention pending deportation. His solicitors requested leave to remain on compassionate grounds since his removal to St Kitts would entail the loss of his medical treatment. The Chief Immigration Officer refused, calling it unacceptable for an AIDS sufferer to receive treatment "at public expense."

The solicitors then filed an appeal with the Court of Human Rights. The British government, unlike France in Ali B.’s case, heeded the Court’s injunction to suspend deportation.

Activists know deportation of someone who is gravely ill is tantamount to a death sentence. For the first time, the European Court of Human Rights has recognized that to deport a man made gravely ill by AIDS amounts to the most peculiarly inhuman and cruel punishment, in clear violation of article three of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Ali B. : the struggle is not over

Ali B., now 39 years old, has lived for the last 25 years in France. Of those 25, he has spent almost ten years in the small town of Bourgoin, either under house arrest or in prison on drug charges, at the mercy of the local police’s discretionary powers over his immigration status.

Every three months, Ali B. has to re-apply for the right... to remain under house arrest. At some point, the préfet decided to grant him the right to work : an administrator simply scribbled out the note on Ali B.’s permit which says it is "not valid for employment."

To go see his doctor at the closest hospital with AIDS care, in Grenoble, Ali B. had to ask for a laissez-passer from the police. Yet Ali B. told very few people of his medical condition. He did not want anyone to know, whatever the cost, that he had to live with the AIDS virus.

A chance meeting with Ali B. made lawyer Joëlle Vernay decide to take up his case. Her hope was to unravel, knot by knot, the tangled web which made Ali B. a prisoner of the system. On 3 January 1997, lawyer Joëlle Vernay appealed to the Paris tribunal which had forbidden him from staying on French soil.

The appeals court replied on 21 January, saying it could not hear the appeal, as Ali B. was still on French soil. Three days later, the Interior Ministry annuled his house arrest, thereby lifting the stay on his deportation order. Overnight, Ali B. lost what few rights he still had.

Ali B.’s case entered the courts in the middle of heated debate and protest over the Juppé government’s latest amendments to immigration law. "I can imagine what happened," Vernay speculates. "The judge must have looked at this case, and said, here was an AIDS victim who is costing France a lot of money, yet we can be rid of him simply by annuling the house arrest."

It took until 6 February for the police identity checks to fall on Ali B. and arrest him. He called for Vernay to come see him. At the station, the police assure her she can come back tomorrow morning, that there is no problem. "And why would the police lie?" asks Vernay with irony.

Late in the night, police took Ali B. to the airport. When he refused to board the plane, they took the train. It took six hours to reach Marseille. In dawn’s early light, police pushed Ali B. up the ramp leading into the Napoléon ferry.

At 9 am, Vernay showed up at the police station. "They said to me : it’s too late," she recalls. Vernay got on the phone, calling AIDS organizations and the anti-deportation Cimade in Grenoble and Marseille.

In Marseille by 10 am, activists had taken over the Napoléon’s pier, refusing to let the ship set sail until Ali B. was brought down. At the same time, they argued with the police that Ali B. could not be deported. Police laughed in their face, asking for proof, and eventually severed the ropes tying the ship to shore.

A second ordeal began. Ali B. would spend seven weeks in Tunis’s only hospital with an AIDS ward, located in an asylum for the mentally ill. Overnight, his full name became front-page news, any shreds of confidentiality blown apart by police statements and press coverage about his deportation. His family heard about what had happened by reading the newspaper.

Tunisian immigrant organizations in Paris began to funnel the crucial packages of combination therapy to him. Vernay filed eight appeals, a week after his deportation, and the appeals court agreed to deal with them quickly. Ordinarily, such appeals can take two or three years.

In Paris, Grenoble, and Marseille, organizations worked continuously over the next seven weeks for his return. On 19 March, Ali B. won the appeal. And by the end of the month, he had made his way back to France.

But the story does not end there. Ali B. today lives in precisely the same conditions as before the deportation. A Papers for Ali B. petition launched by a few of the campaigners has garnered almost 400 signatures in almost five months, but this is far from enough.

And the disinterest from some groups show that, while they may oppose deportations like Ali B.’s, they do not want to see that the current barriers to health care and abominable living conditions of the sans-papiers constitute themselves a grave violation of human rights. nm

For more information on the Papers for Ali B. petition, contact MAHA.