Deportation flights cost £800, the price tag the Home Office pays BA per asylum seeker per chartered flight to forcibly remove and deny refugees asylum and sanctuary. According to the Home Office’s published statistics for January this year, 814 applicants were removed by force from the UK with an estimated 300 of them (10 per day) being expelled on a BA flight. If the corporation is forced by public pressure to pull out as the main carrier, then the government’s policy of mass expulsion will be unworkable. An international fax campaign last year targeting Lufthansa and exposing deaths of asylum seekers while escorted on deportation flights in Belgium and Germany, forced Lufhansa to pull out as a carrier and stopped the deportation flight carrying Bristol-based Iraqi-Kurd Amanj Gafor. Following on from this action, civil disobedience by activists on board BA deportation flights, protests at check-in desks and solidarity action by PCS union air traffic control workers forced BA to pull out of Amanj’s deportation. In the end the government was forced to deport him by boat to Germany. This shows that BA is not immune to anti-corporate attack.

Every deportation is effectively a death sentence for the deported. If not, directly at the hands of the executioners of regimes like the Islamic Republic of Iran when dissidents are returned on deportation flights, then indirectly as a result NATO bombing, sanctions and DU poisoning. BA’s trade in human life can and must be stopped.

Freely distribute the Brutish Unfairways Destination Deportation subvert (BritUnf.PDF)

Links:
1) Deportation Alliance
 http://www.deportation-alliance.com/ba/
2) Bristol Defend Asylum Seekers Campaign
 http://www.geocities.com/bdasc/
3) Guardian Article on Heathrow Protest ‘Clipped Wings’
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4044017,00.html
4) Details of Anti-Deportation Action Trial Picket
 http://www.geocities.com/bdasc/news.html