Mentally ill man can’t be returned to Sierra Leone – UK courts

15 August 2019 · Carmel Rickard

There might be widespread agreement that mental illness should be de-stigmatised, but that does not make it any easier for courts dealing with people who show signs of serious psychological ill-health and who are liable to mistreatment because of their illness. In this case, the UK courts were faced with the problem of a man from Sierra Leone, who believed he was the son of legendary Jamaican reggae singer Bob Marley and had absolutely no understanding of his mental condition. He has been fighting to stay on in the UK, saying the government of Sierra Leone would victimize him on his return because Marley, his father, had started a local war there. The government would also ‘want to recruit him’, again because Marley was his father.

Read judgment

Initially FC came to the UK in 2002 when he was 26. He has been fighting his deportation back to Sierra Leone virtually from the time he arrived. One court after another has turned down his plea not to be returned, including his more recent efforts to claim asylum.

Then, in November 2018 a court found that FC would have difficulty in obtaining suitable mental health treatment on his return, and was likely to suffer mistreatment. The judge said that there was a lack of treatment for mentally ill people in Sierra Leone and so FC would not be able to access hospital-based psychiatric care. He would also ‘suffer societal stigma and harm due to his mental illness’ and his return would thus be in breach of the Human Rights Convention.

In an appeal against this decision, FC argued that he should be given asylum because he would be victimized by the government of Sierra Leone on account of being Bob Marley’s son. Since that argument was a ‘delusion’, said the appeal court, were there other grounds on which he might be allowed to stay?

As far as the UK government was concerned, there would be adequate treatment available for FC in Sierra Leone, an argument that was strongly challenged by various reports and witnesses.

The psychiatrist who examined FC said the man believed he was in a relationship with the singer Rita Ora and he lived in fear of the Freemasons. He had ‘an entire set of elaborate delusional beliefs’ related to his ‘exalted birth’. He had been conceived when Marley was in Sierra Leone. Marley was the ‘cause of the war in Sierra Leone’ and as a result FC believed the government and the people now targeted him (FC) and made his life miserable. Marley had left a lot of properties including the building now being used as the official residence of the President of Sierra Leone, and this also created hostility between FC and the government of Sierra Leone.

The doctor said the FC ought to be in a psychiatric hospital with 24-hour monitoring. Even the government’s doctor did not disagree, saying that it would be difficult for him to advise that FC would be ‘fit to fly’, given his ongoing psychotic disorder.

Updating the earlier reports, the first doctor said FC now feared he would be put to death if he returned, and this fear could cause a complete collapse of his mental health state.

The appeal court said it took into account that if he were to return there would be no family to protect and help him and that he would not cope given all the ‘upheavals’ in the country since he left. He would be unlikely to ask for medical help since he did not recognize he was ill. Specialist reports before the court indicated that Sierra Leone had little capacity to deal with the needs of people like FC. There seemed to be two options. One was the sole psychiatric hospital providing 24-hour care in which patients were ‘shackled by their hands or feet without proper clothing or beds’. The only alternative was the ‘City of Rest’ – a rundown building that housed 40 patients crammed into small rooms. They were chained by the ankle when they arrived.

The reports also noted that people with several mental illnesses in Sierra Leone and in many other West African countries were socially ostracized with public taunts and harassment. Despite more than 20 years of effort to combat such ‘stigma, cultural mores and harm’, threats to people with mental illness remained 'pervasive regionally and globally’.

In response to these reports the court said it concluded that FC would be at risk on return of ‘significant ill-treatment’ because of his mental state.

‘He has no idea that he is in need of help.’

‘For this combination of reasons, I conclude that there would be no sufficiency of protection for (FC) in Sierra Leone. I am satisfied that the risk … would exist wherever he were in Sierra Leone as is clear from the medical reports before me.’

FC has ‘a well-founded fear of persecution in Sierra Leone on account of how he would, as a person suffering from mental ill-health, be treated. … Accordingly, I allow the appeal on Refugee Convention and Human Rights Convention grounds.’

* Though they are often distressing, cases about those threatened with deportation to their home countries can provide an opportunity to see through the eyes of others. And, as in this case, to realise how much work still remains to improve the conditions of some of the continent’s most vulnerable people.

Carmel Rickard

About the author

Recent articles by Carmel Rickard

‘No justification for the unjustifiable’: Lesotho’s ombud slams grand-scale torture, assault in Maseru prison

22 March 2024
Carmel Rickard

Lesotho’s national ombud, Tlotliso Angelina Polaki, has issued a scathing report on massive-scale torture and assaults that took place in Maseru’s central correctional institution during December 2023, leaving about 95% of the inmates of the prison injured, one dead and one who is now wheelchair-bound and will never walk again.

Major court decision on image rights benefits Ugandan soccer players

21 March 2024
Carmel Rickard

Members of Uganda’s national soccer team from the period around 2007/8 have just been awarded a payout against MTN Uganda by the commercial court. The telecom giant had a year-long contract with Proline, the players’ originating development soccer club, allowing it to use the players’ images for advertising. But MTN had continued to use their images even after that contract expired on the basis that it had a sponsorship agreement with Fufa, soccer’s governing body in Uganda. The players then challenged MTN in court, through Proline, and have now won a significant damages award. But the judgment exposed some serious flaws in the way that Fufa has approached the question of using the image rights of its senior players, and the court commented that this is a ‘case study’ for why Fufa needs to sort out its contractual arrangements with senior players.

Executive interference in Ugandan court decisions continues – this time by the justice minister

21 March 2024
Carmel Rickard

Uganda’s minister of justice, Norbert Mao, has taken a leaf straight from the book of the country’s president, Yoweri Museveni. This week, the minister wrote to the principal judge of the Ugandan high court, asking that the judge directly intervene in a matter that has been brought to his attention by an MP on behalf of a constituent. Mao asked for the ‘immediate administrative intervention’ in the matter by the principal judge. Earlier this year, Museveni wrote a similar letter to the chief justice of Uganda, also requesting intervention in a matter, and the CJ later indicated that this was not the first time it had happened.

Is rape by family members treated too lightly by the law?

19 March 2024
Carmel Rickard

The high court has sent the case of a Malawian teenager, charged with raping his 89-year-old grandmother, back to the magistrate’s court for a possible re-trial because the court had wrongly prosecuted a case of rape instead of incest. If convicted in a re-trial, however, Malawi’s incest law could see the accused sentenced to a mere five years. Malawi’s penal code provides for a significant difference between the sentence to be imposed when a man rapes a close family member, and in a case where the two are not related. When they are unrelated, the code provides that a rape offender ‘shall be liable to be punished with death or with imprisonment for life’ (However, Malawi has had what amounts to a moratorium on carrying out the death penalty since 1992.) By contrast, ‘incest by males’, is categorised in the code as a ‘felony’, and anyone convicted ‘shall be liable for imprisonment for five years’. There is an exception: if it is proved ‘that the female person is under the age of 16, the offender shall be liable to imprisonment for life’.

Prominent SA advocates lose battle over conviction in Namibian courts for working without a permit, misleading immigration officials

6 March 2024
Carmel Rickard

Two prominent South African advocates have just lost their last hope of squashing their convictions in the Namibian courts. Johannesburg advocates, Mike Hellens SC and Dawie Joubert SC, had been found guilty on two counts, first, working as legal practitioners without an employment permit, and second, giving false or misleading information to immigration officers when they entered the country in 2019. Though they had gone to Namibia to appear in court in a bail application, they told the immigration officials they were there for a ‘visit’ and for a ‘meeting’. Both appealed against their conviction but they had also asked for a judicial review of the decision. In the high court they lost their appeal but won on the review. The outcome in both matters were taken to the apex supreme court for a final word. In December 2023, they lost their appeal at the supreme court. What would that same court say when the state appealed against the review finding? The supreme court has now given its answer: it found the review, that had favoured Hellens and Joubert, was wrongly decided, and set it aside, awarding costs against the two advocates in both the high court and the supreme court.