Iranian woman facing deportation is at risk of stoning

guardian.co.uk

Farah Ghaemi, accused by Iran of circulating The Satanic Verses, faces removal from UK with her two children tomorrow

An Iranian woman accused by the Tehran regime of circulating copies of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses is at risk of being stoned and flogged if her forced removal from the UK takes place as planned tomorrow, her MP has said.

Gerald Kaufman, Labour MP for Gorton, where a campaign to prevent the family's removal is based, described as "intolerable" the decision to remove Farah Ghaemi, 45, her son Ahmed, 20 and her 10-year-old son known as Child M.

"This woman will undoubtedly be exposed to the possibility of being flogged, tortured, imprisoned or stoned," he said. "This is an extremely cruel and dangerous regime. To send a family that includes a vulnerable woman to a place with Iran's current and past record strikes me as intolerable."

The planned removal comes as fears grow for the safety of dissident Iranian women after the case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, 43, who faces execution after being convicted of adultery. She has reportedly been sentenced to receive 99 lashes in prison for "spreading corruption and indecency" after a picture said to be of her without a veil - though in fact of another woman - appeared in the Times.

Kaufman wrote to the immigration minister, Damian Green, but as of yesterday had not yet had a reply. "I have been in parliament for 40 years and I have never dealt with a government, Labour or Conservative, that has been so heartless and uncaring about individual immigration cases as this one," he said.

Supporters fear the family, who have been in the UK since fleeing Iran in 2007, are being included in the coalition governments' trial of chartering flights to return asylum seekers with children to their countries of origin as quickly as possible.

In August Ghaemi attended an interview in which she was asked to voluntarily return to Iran, and told that otherwise she would be forcibly removed. She refused and was informed that she would be issued with removal orders within two weeks.

All previous attempts by the family to claim asylum in the UK have failed, but lawyers are currently re-applying on new grounds, arguing that the 10-year-old boy is undergoing counselling for trauma experienced during a stint at Yarl's Wood detention centre. Donna Brown, solicitor for the family, said there had been no assessment of Child M's mental state and that he had been receiving weekly counselling since January for the trauma he suffered while in detention. A separate application was made on Friday for an injunction against the removal from the European court of human rights.

The family say they came to the UK in the summer of 2007 to visit relatives and recover from the death of Ghaemi's husband, who had died in a car accident. They say they intended to stay only for one or two months, but then received a phone call from Iran saying their home and business had been raided by police.

Lawyers have previously produced a copy and translation of the arrest warrant, which said the arrests were "with respect to disseminating fabrication and propagating against the sacred system of the Islamic Republic of Iran through printing and publishing the noxious book Satanic Verses".