A 49-year-old Nigerian woman has been granted asylum in the United Kingdom after deliberately joining the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a group labeled as a terrorist organization by the Nigerian government. The decision comes after the woman’s asylum application was denied eight times.
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According to MailOnline, the woman, whose identity has not been disclosed, came to the UK in 2011 and joined IPOB in 2017. UK upper tribunal judge Gemma Loughran ruled that the woman’s involvement with IPOB gives her a “well-founded fear of persecution” in Nigeria, her home country.
The judge stated that the woman would likely be identified as an activist upon her return to Nigeria, and the country’s security services are known to “act arbitrarily and arrest, harm and detain those it believes may be involved with IPOB without conducting an assessment of the extent of their involvement or their motivation.”
However, the decision to grant asylum has been met with criticism from Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philip, who called it a “comically ludicrous” interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights. A lower tribunal judge, Iain Burnett, had initially rejected the woman’s claim, stating that she joined IPOB purely “in order to create a claim for asylum.”
The unnamed Nigerian woman had expressed concerns about being arrested at the airport and “disappeared” if she were to return to her country. While IPOB is considered a terrorist organization by the Nigerian government, it is not classified as such in the United Kingdom.
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