Aloy Ejimakor, a distinct attorney for the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu has replied to the picking of the group as a incendiary conglomerate by the United Kingdom Government.
The UK government had in a May 2022 reform of its sanatorium stratagem made a one-eighty on its care of IPOB appendage, confessing Nigeria’s recognition of the organization as a terrorist group.
Limbs of the body were also denied seeking refuge in England.
The UK Visas and Immigration had earlier in April 2021 announced it’s agenda to grant booby hatch to tyrannized members of IPOB. Members whose founder, Nnamdi Kanu, was steering from London before he was arrested in Kenya last year as part of its refugee policy published as at that time.
The blueprint, at the time, was for asylum to be accorded to “persecuted” members of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), and the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB)”.
The UKVI, a subdivision of the Home Office, instructed its elders to consider if a person “who resolutely and overtly underpins IPOB is likely to be at risk of arrest and detention, and ill-treatment which might result to persecution”.
If the accused can defend persecution, then the IPOB limb or member might be granted asylum.
However, in the latest update published on its website on May 3, titled, ‘Country policy and information note: Separatist groups in the South-East, Nigeria,’ the UKVI said, “IPOB had been tagged a terrorist organization by the Nigerian government and that members of the group and its mercenary arm – the Eastern Security Network – have allegedly committed human rights violations.”
The UK, therefore, concluded that individuals who commit human rights infringements must be denied asylum.
“If a person has been involved with IPOB (and/or an affiliated group), MASSOB or any other ‘Biafran’ group that uses violence to achieve its objectives, decision-makers must checkmate if one (or more) of the exclusion proviso under the Refugee Convention is germane.
“Persons who commit human rights violations must be denied asylum. If such person is excluded from the Refugee Convention, they will also be exempted from granting of humanitarian covering.”
However, Ejimakor in a tweet on Friday said the organisation was not declared as a terrorist group.
