Semira Adamu

"I was woken at 6.30 a.m. and given twenty minutes to prepare for departure... When we arrived at the airport my hands and feet were bound and I was thrown into an isolation cell for over three hours. At 11.15 they forced me onto the plane. I began to scream and cry as I was surrounded by six gendarmes and two men from Sabena. The airline men pushed me around and one held a cushion to my face. He almost suffocated me. These men were supposed to accompany me all the way to Lome. Passengers intervened at this point, saying that they would get off the plane if the men did not let me go."

"As commander of the security detachment at the national airport I believe that I am officially responsible for the death of Semira Adamu."

"Her (Semira) death is not a singular incident. The deaths of refugees are the symptoms of policies that no longer see the humanity of those fleeing their homeland, but prefer to see them as numbers, or worse, as a natural disaster, a "flood"."

"Semira was vulnerable to various racialised intersections of exclusion: She was Black, female, young and ambitious She was attractive, eloquent and well educated She was an asylum-seeker whose application had been rejected She was an undocumented person with an 'illegal' status She was a deportable detainee who was deemed expendable She was a whistleblower and defender of detainee rights."

"The death of Semira is part of a series of complaints and is the result of several new laws to get asylum in Belgium."

"Whatever judgment Brussels Tribunal (Tribunal correctionnel) hands down on 12 December to five law enforcement officers tried in connection with the death of Semira Adamu, during an attempt to deport her forcibly by air in September 1998, it has always been clear that governments and state officers have a responsibility to ensure respect for the physical safety and inherent dignity of all people in their custody, including deportees."