Sri Lankan girl 'heavily sedated' on flight

By MATHEW DEARNALEY and NZPA

A Sri Lankan teenager forced to leave New Zealand after being refused asylum was heavily sedated and restrained during her flight home, according to a television reporter on the flight.

The 16-year-old girl, whose high-profile immigration case here involved claims she suffered years of sexual abuse by male relatives in Sri Lanka, is now at a Catholic convent in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo.

The girl, a Buddhist, was "heavily sedated and motionless in a wheelchair" when she arrived at the airport, a One News reporter said from Colombo.

She had been given drugs for the long flight via Korea.

The girl's mother told the Herald from Hong Kong last night her daughter had called her late on Saturday, crying and saying she did not want to stay at the nunnery.

The distraught mother was deprived for more than 12 hours of word that the girl had survived the expulsion from New Zealand.

Carole Curtis, a lawyer for the teenager and her maternal grandmother, said the mother kept phoning from Hong Kong in desperation for news before receiving the call from her daughter in Sri Lanka.

It also seems that the Immigration Service may have supplied a medical officer with an inadequate interpreter in its rush to clear the girl fit to travel nine days after another psychiatric assessment deemed her dangerously dehydrated and at risk of renal failure.

Ms Curtis, who battled for more than a year to save the pair from an uncertain future in their homeland and the feared wrath of abusive male relatives, also spent an anxious Saturday awaiting confirmation of their arrival. She could learn nothing from the Immigration Service more than 12 hours after the girl was handed over to Sri Lankan officials.

When word finally arrived, via the girl's mother, it was hardly reassuring. "She told me her daughter was crying and crying, and telling her she was frightened and didn't want to be there."

The grandmother was similarly upset, saying the girl had vomited from medicine given to her before and during the flight from Auckland on Thursday night and had kept asking what she had done wrong to be bundled out of an ambulance and on to an aircraft in handcuffs.

Ms Curtis said it appeared an escort party of three police officers and a psychiatric nurse handed the pair straight to Sri Lankan officials before returning immediately to New Zealand without any attempt to report their mission accomplished.

"They have been met by strangers who they are frightened of," she said.

She had been gravely concerned for the girl's welfare on the plane, claiming her client was removed from New Zealand in a dangerously dehydrated condition, despite clearance from a medical officer who pronounced her "physically well".

Middlemore Hospital psychiatric registrar Dr Daniel de Klerk, who examined her for the Immigration Service, said in a report that the grandmother told an interpreter the girl had eaten and drunk regularly before her removal.

But he identified the interpreter as Tamil, apparently unaware that the girl and her grandmother spoke a different language as members of Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority.

The Herald has been unable to contact Dr de Klerk for comment.

Associate Immigration Minister Damien O'Connor has called the case "clearly one of the more difficult" of more than 3000 he has to deal with annually under his discretionary powers, but says he believes strongly the girl will be better off in her own culture.

He says his officials have negotiated a comprehensive care and protection plan with the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and a charity. The charity is run by an order of Catholic nuns.

The girl is Buddhist, but Auckland Catholic communications director Lindsay Freer, who nominated the charity after immigration officials allegedly told her they did not know where else to send the girl, is confident there will be no discrimination.

An IOM official told Radio New Zealand from Geneva that he was unable to say what psychological assistance she would receive.

This was because the IOM was given "not much time" and little information about the teenager to prepare for her arrival.

Mr O'Connor promised that his officials would seek regular progress reports on the girl's welfare under its deal with the IOM, of which New Zealand is a member country.

Her mother, one of thousands of Sri Lankan women forced for economic reasons to work overseas as domestic servants, confirmed to the Herald the girl's fear of staying in Sri Lanka, but would not discuss the abuse suffered by her daughter.

The woman said she could not afford to lose her job by returning to Sri Lanka and her daughter would be unable to stay in Hong Kong.

"I thought New Zealand was one of the good countries - I never expected it to do such unfair things to my daughter," she said, before becoming too upset to keep talking.

Mr O'Connor has defended the speed with which the girl was expelled just hours after he reconfirmed a decision not to let her stay, saying all psychiatric reports had recommended swift action so as not to prolong the stress of uncertainty.