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The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

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Deportation Backfires

Italy's answer to growing prostitution has been deportation. In the span of a year between 1999 and 2000, more than 500 Nigerian prostitutes were rounded up and deported back to Nigeria at very short notice. 

From a Human Rights Watch report on trafficking  Not only have anti-prostitution immigration laws been largely useless in curbing the trafficking of women and girls, but they have been enforced in ways that compound the harm to the trafficking victims. The wrongful application of these statutes has been an important means by which traffickers and pimps intimidate and control womenand girls, and in some cases a way by which corrupt officials profit from their plight. The discriminatory and arbitrary arrest of trafficking victims violates women's rights to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex and to the equal protection of the law.

The policy of deportation plays into the hands of the pimps and traffickers, who use it to denounce veteran prostitutes that are close to paying off their debt to the Italian police. (With the veterans deported, they can secure new, younger victims.)

It also adds to the stress of the women (many of whom are infected with the HIV-AIDS virus) and makes their reintegration in Nigeria much harder. This in turn adds to the burden on the financially strapped Nigerian authorities.

The first mass deportation of Nigerian women from Italy in March 1999 came as a nasty surprise to the Nigerian authorities. Not only were they completely unprepared for the sudden influx, they were also deeply angered by the fact that each woman was escorted back by two Italian policemen. The implication that the girls were somehow dangerous was deeply resented.

Nonetheless, the treatment of the returnees on their return home to Nigeria is also deeply intimidating. When the girls leave the plane at Lagos airport, they are gathered together and roughly questioned by immigration police, who check the travel documents that were issued to them by the Nigerian embassy officials in Italy. Using whatever pressure they see fit, the police also try to identify their families.

After the airport, the girls are driven in convoy to the headquarters of the Federal Police in the Alagbon district of Lagos. During the first deportations in 1999, this process was also rough and unfriendly. The first batch of 64 girls spent several weeks at Alagbon under a detaining order. Here they were screened for medical diseases and interviewed in detail.

Mrs. Abimbola Ojomo, the Assistant Inspector General (AIG) of the Nigerian federal police, said that although these girls have not committed an offence under Nigeria law, their detention is justified as a potential threat to public health and safety. In addition, she said, her staff were completely unprepared for the mass arrival. "We needed the time to get organized and create a procedure."

Mrs. Ojomo expressed some sympathy for the girls. But at the same time, the government took a policy decision to make an example out of the girls and exhibit them to the press in an attempt to generate some bad publicity around trafficking.

The girls were addressed by Oba (paramount ruler) of Edo State, who sent messages of reprimand to their parents and families. They were paraded before local journalists, who interviewed them and broadcast the results on television. The girls were furious, and in a spirited show of defiance they howled down the journalists. All agree that the event was a complete disaster.

According to one prominent advocate in Benin City, the girls are medically screened in Lagos, whether they like it or not-and the results are then sent back to Edo State. Once their stay in Lagos is finished, they are then taken to the governor's house in Benin City, Edo State, where they are again paraded in front of the press then screened a second time. This includes another medical test, which is deemed necessary, said one expert, "because parents often won't believe the first result."

The results are supposed to be confidential, but the statistics are available. We were told that the rate of HIV infection among the returning girls is in excess of 50 percent. 

"Parents were happy to live off the proceeds without coming clean about where the money came from. It is time for them to face the consequences."

This entire process contains enough coercion to alarm any human rights activist, but there is such a siege mentality in Edo State about trafficking that even feminists feel it is justified. Esther Onosode of AWEG feels the families that support this trafficking must be shamed-just as they were allowed to flaunt the wealth that it brought in yesteryear.

The few Western diplomats with an interest in trafficking seem genuinely appalled at the severe treatment meted out to the girls on their return to Nigeria, but they are embarrassed into silence by the fact that their own governments seem only interested in deportation. This is particularly true of Italy, whose authorities seem supremely indifferent to the pressures and problems caused by the deportations back in Nigeria.

The selfishness of the Italians infuriates senior Nigerian officials. In one discussion with WOCON and the Advocacy Project, Assistant Inspector General Ojomo said that Nigerian prostitutes are performing an important social service in Italy by helping to keep Italian marriages together and taking some of the pressure off overworked and unstable Italian men. Their reward was to be unceremoniously deported. "Our girls are not sleeping with themselves. Europe cannot deport our girls with levity."

Mrs. Ojomo also pointed out that the Italians fail to even provide advance notice of not more than a day-even though the girls are detained for several days before being put on a plane.

"If we knew in advance, we'd be able to make some preparations," says Mrs. Ojomo. "With numbers like these, our detention facility is swamped. We don't even have the budget to feed them properly."

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