Home secretary urged not to deport Lydia Besong and her husband, who fear they will be persecuted in Cameroon
Bestselling authors and leading human rights figures have joined forces to condemn the UK Border Agency's decision to deport a Cameroonian playwright and her husband.
A coalition of writers including former children's laureate Michael Morpurgo, Helena Kennedy, Monica Ali, Hanif Kureishi, Nick Hornby and Alan Ayckbourn have written to the home secretary, Theresa May, to urge her not to deport Lydia Besong and her husband, Bernard Batey.
Kennedy, a leading QC, described the agency's decision to deport the couple as "hideous" and "insensitive" and called for an overhaul of the way women are treated in the asylum system.
Besong is due to be deported back to Cameroon – where she says she was raped and would be persecuted for speaking out against the government – on Saturday, if last-minute attempts to prevent her removal fail.
Supporters say Besong was not informed that her husband's latest appeal against deportation had failed on 23 December. Instead they were taken into detention when they registered normally with immigration services on 10 January.
Since arriving in the UK in 2006 Besong has written three plays about her life as an asylum seeker and criticising the political situation in her home country.
Besong's play How I Became an Asylum Seeker – produced by Women for Refugee Women, who continue to support Besong – has been performed in Manchester, Salford, Liverpool and London. She believes that she and her husband would be in danger if they returned to Cameroon, after her work garnered negative media coverage in their home country.
Rehearsals for a new play were due to begin in Manchester the week that she was detained at Yarl's Wood removal centre, with a performance scheduled at an international theatre festival in Bristol at the end of March. Her husband is being kept separately.
Morpurgo said he was "begging" the home secretary not to remove a "remarkable woman". He said: "How this country treats asylum seekers is the measure of what kind of a people we are. Lydia was oppressed in Cameroon. That there is risk she will be imprisoned and abused again seems undeniable. That she is extraordinarily brave in her stand against oppression is clear. And that her talents would be of great value to us as a citizen in our society would seem to be obvious."
Kennedy said the manner in which Besong and Batey had been detained was unfair. "The way in which this was done was hideous, with the couple not informed they were going to be removed. The whole way it was carried out was insensitive and terrible," she said.
The Home Office and the UKBA was "failing" women, she said. "There are serious concerns about the culture of disbelief in the immigration system," she said, adding that a lack of training and willingness to listen meant women who had been raped were not able to tell their stories.
"There is an ongoing lack of understanding of the issues and how they effect women, because they do effect women differently."
Lawyers for the couple are now seeking an emergency judicial review to stop the deportation. Supporters argue that cuts to legal aid have left Besong more exposed, and reliant on fundraising to pay for legal representation. "It is so hard to get good legal advice in these cases and cuts to legal aid mean the only way of getting advice is to rely on others to pay. It is just hellish," said Kennedy.
Speaking from Yarl's Wood, Besong said: "Of course it would put me in danger if I was returned to Cameroon. There is no hiding that my work is critical of the current government. I would be detained indefinitely. There is no freedom of expression in Cameroon, this is happening every day."
But she would not stop writing, she added. "I wanted to highlight what was happening at home," she said. "If it couldn't be beneficial to me maybe it could be beneficial to others. I didn't know I would find myself in this situation. I am very, very scared."
The couple say they were jailed and tortured in Cameroon as punishment for involvement with the SCNC pressure group which campaigns for southern Cameroon's independence. Besong said that while in jail, she was raped by a guard.
Previously Juliet Stevenson, Joan Bakewell, Andrea Levy, Ali Smith, Sarah Waters, Lisa Appignanesi, Linda Grant and the writers' group English Pen have all expressed their support for Besong.