Gold medal-winning disabled athlete in Britain faces deportation

From The Guardian in the UK:

A wheelchair-using elite athlete, who has won five gold medals for Britain, is facing by deportation after being convicted of a driving offence.

Vincent Onwubiko, 42, who has lived in Britain since arriving here from Nigeria in 1994, is being held in an immigration removal centre, where his disability caused by polio makes it impossible for him to use the toilets. He also claims he was assaulted after he was denied a shower.

Campaigners claim that he should not be deported since his crime does not meet the criteria to be deemed "dangerous" and that he has been maltreated in establishments ill-equipped to cope with his immobility.

Onwubiko, a power-lifter, represented Britain at the prestigious Stoke Mandeville games in 1995 and 1997, and at the World Champion of Champions competition in Birmingham in 1996, collecting five gold medals in all.

In 2007, he received a five-month prison sentence for driving while disqualified. He had twice been convicted of careless driving, once after jumping a red light. At the end of that sentence, he was arrested and taken to Dover Immigration Removal Centre (IRC), which would not admit him, because he does not have the use of his legs. He was taken to Brixton prison. In January 2008, he was granted bail, but re-arrested last August after being called in for an interview, and has been in detention ever since.

On New Year's Eve, Onwubiko was in Harmondsworth IRC, near Heathrow. He claims that staff refused to take him for a shower and, when he tried to wash himself at a sink, he splashed water on the floor, whereupon staff wrestled him to the ground and placed him in segregation. Staff at the centre confirmed that he was in the segregation unit.

The following day he was moved to Colnbrook IRC, also near Heathrow. A doctor from the Medical Justice Network visited him last Tuesday. Dr Charmian Goldwyn said Onwubiko's injuries were consistent with his claim of assault. She noted the handcuff marks on his wrists and asked why a man who could not walk needed to wear restraints.

She said that this was not the first case of alleged assault she had examined in the IRCs, but "it is the first case of a disabled person who has injuries consistent to being brutally assaulted".

David Wood, former chair of Lazurus Refugee Concern, has visited Onwubiko and compares his treatment with that of other disabled athletes.

"Eighteen paralympians were named in the New Year's Honours list; all that Vincent gets is a deportation order," he said.

Glyn Hibbert, director of the British Wheelchair Sports Foundation, described Onwubiko as an "excellent weightlifter and a decent young man". He said that, if the Home Office had granted him papers to obtain a visa, Onwubiko would have been part of the GB team at the Paralympic Games in Atlanta in 1996.

Emma Ginn, the co-ordinator of Medical Justice, said she was shocked, but not surprised, at the allegations of assault on Onwubiko. "Our recent report, 'Outsourcing Abuse', analysed the findings of nearly 300 alleged assault cases. We found an alarming number of injuries and seemingly systematic abuse of vulnerable people."

A spokesman for UK Border Agency said detention and removal were essential parts of effective immigration controls, but that they "treat every person we detain as sensitively as possible".