I was expecting that the subject of this article, Palestinian hunger striker Khader Adnan, would not be alive by the time this article was published. Adnan, a 33- year old baker and father of two daughters living in the occupied West Bank, is a political activist and spokesman for Islamic Jihad, who was hunger striking against the Israeli practice of administrative detention. His 66-days strike was the longest in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mr Adnan was hospitalised and lay shackled to his hospital bed, despite the Israeli authorities’ commitment to unshackle him. However, as I was preparing to write this, Mr Adnan agreed to end his hunger strike in return for the state of Israel releasing him on 17 April. Continue reading “End administrative detention of Palestinians by Israel”
Headless hookers and suitcase bodies
In July 2004 a badly decomposed body, described by the media as that of ‘a black non-national woman’ was discovered in a black plastic bag on a river bank in Co Kilkenny. Because she arrived as an asylum seeker in 2000, and, like all asylum seekers, had been fingerprinted, Gardai identified her through the finger printing data base at the Garda National Immigration Bureau as that of the 25 year old married mother of two Paiche Onyemaechi. She turned out to be the daughter of the Malawian chief justice and a lap dancer and prostitute. Because her body was found without a head by a local Kilkenny woman walking her dog, it did not take long for media representations to describe Paiche Onyemaechi as a ‘headless hooker’. Continue reading “Headless hookers and suitcase bodies”
Residency rights and deportations – good news for some?
Having given the Minister for Justice a qualified welcome at the start of his term, the time has come to begin scrutinising the work of his Department on immigration and integration. Having abolished the office of the Minister for Integration and replaced it with an understaffed section called the office for the promotion of migrant integration, Minister Shatter has vowed to speed up citizenship applications – very good news, and introduce citizenship tests and citizenship ceremonies, less good news, but for some migrants a positive step all the same. And, last week his department granted residency to 850 non-EU parents of Irish citizen children, though only after the European Court of Justice ruled last March that the non-EU parents of EU citizens must be allowed to live and work in that EU state. Continue reading “Residency rights and deportations – good news for some?”
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