Diplomat's 'slave' can stay in UK

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News Article by The Guardian posted on November 12, 2002 at 13:01:31: EST (-5 GMT)
Published at www.sudan.net

Diplomat's 'slave' can stay in UK

By David Leigh
Tuesday November 12, 2002
The Guardian

Immigration minister Beverley Hughes yesterday reversed a decision to deport a young woman who says she was kept as a slave at the London home of a Sudanese diplomat.

Mende Nazer was tearful when told the news at the college where she is learning English: "Oh my God, this is wonderful news," she said. "Thank you so much."

"I'm much relieved that the Home Office is rethinking," said Baroness Cox, a prominent anti-slavery campaigner who received the letter with the decision.

"I hope more than anything that this goes at least some way to putting Mende's mind at rest.

"I also hope that the Home Office will now do everything in its power to make the right decision, and quickly."

Officials had originally ruled that Mende Nazer, who says she escaped from the Willesden Green house of the diplomat, was not entitled to political asylum.

But yesterday Ms Hughes said: "Under the circumstances the decision to refuse Ms Nazer will be withdrawn." In her letter she added: "Her asylum application will be carefully reconsidered once all the relevant information has been submitted to the Home Office".

The Guardian disclosed Ms Nazer's allegation this year that she had been kept as a slave in London by a member of Sudan's fundamentalist Islamic regime.

But the minister wrote yesterday that the Home Office had not known that Ms Nazer had written a book describing her claims that she had been captured as a 13-year-old by Arab slave traders, and sold into domestic service.

In the book, recently published in Germany, she said she had been shipped to London on false papers to work as an unpaid maid for the acting Sudanese chargé d'affaires, Abdel Al-Koronky, before escaping from his home.

Mr Al-Koronky denies her account, saying she was brought over as an au pair. His spokesman, David Hoile, said she became homesick and fell in with Sudanese exiles who exploited her.

Officials originally backed Mr Al-Koronky's version, the minister said: "The Home Office did not accept she had been brought to the UK as a slave".

But Ms Hughes said they had now received further details from Ms Nazer's own lawyers which they would study: "Regrettably, the letter giving the reasons for refusing Ms Nazer's claim did not deal clearly with some of the issues regarding credibility or the objective country information on Sudan."