The National Union of Journalists has joined the fight to stop the deportation of Rzhwan Amin.
Amin settled in Tameside after fleeing Iraq in 2010 because of threats following a series of newspaper articles he’d written.
But the 32-year-old has since been taken to the Morton Hall immigration removal centre in Lincolnshire, with plans to deport him on Monday. He was detained when he went to report at the Dallas Court Home Office Reporting Centre in Salford earlier this month.
Support for Amin has come from various international organisations, such as The Kurdistan Journalists’ Syndicate, Iraq Journalists Freedom Observatory and Reporters without Borders. Locally, the Manchester and Salford NUJ branch is campaigning for him to be granted asylum in the UK and this has been backed nationally.
While in Manchester, Amin has become a member of RAPAR, the Manchester-based human rights organisation and a volunteer for the British Red Cross and Manchester Refugee Support Network.
In 2010, Amin was doing political reports for a newspaper in Kirkuk, when he was summoned to appear at a meeting of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party (PUK), to discuss his writing. A friend warned him that it was a trap. Escaping through Turkey, Amin claimed asylum in the UK in 2010. His immigration case has been dismissed by 2 UK judges, and now his lawyers are preparing an application for judicial review and plan to to go the European Court of Human Rights.
