Noelle Must Stay

Noelle has lived in the UK for 6 years. She has not lived in Rwanda since 1995. She is active in St Marie’s Catholic Cathedral and has enrolled for college courses and involved herself in work for the charity Mencap.

Mencap has described her as a ‘sensitive caring individual’, and the college as ‘able, pleasant, co-operative and well liked by peers and tutors alike’. A representative of the Cathedral says she is someone of ‘deep faith and generous spirit’. Her problems have arisen because of her membership of the ruling Hutu party in Rwanda, the MRND, which she joined around the age of 16 or 17, and for which she recruited members. Following this, the genocide against the Tutsis took place and some members of the Party whom she recruited took part in the genocide. Noelle’s father was Hutu and her mother was Tutsi. Noelle was always opposed to the genocide, but would have difficulty convincing the gacaca (local community) courts if she was returned.
Her previous political involvement and that of her father led to Noelle being imprisoned, where she was assaulted, beaten and tortured. She has submitted medical evidence confirming her ill-treatment. The adjudicators have accepted that, had she come straight to the UK in 1995, she would have been granted asylum.

She fled Rwanda to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she lived for 8 years. She left the DRC reluctantly, when she had evidence that agents of the Rwandan government knew where she was and were looking for her. Her father had been killed when he returned to Rwanda in 1995.

The US State Department Country Report on Rwanda published in 2008 referred to ‘significant human rights abuses’, torture and abuse of suspects, and an increase in extrajudicial killings by security forces. Amnesty International’s 2008 Report recorded that the speeding up of trials in the gacaca courts (established as a community form of justice) ‘was at the expense of the fairness and quality of the rulings’.

We the undersigned appeal to the Home Office to let Noelle stay here in safety in the UK, where she has shown herself to be hardworking and of good character, and has contributed very positively to the society which she feels is now her home.