Lesbian Nigerian refugee celebrates becoming a lawyer a decade after being held in detention
For queer refugees seeking asylum in the UK, Europe, and North America, navigating the legal system can be fraught with difficulty and even life-threatening peril. Lesbian Nigerian refugee Aderoke Apata faced detention for more than a year in the UK’s Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre while immigration officers reviewed her application for refugee status with suspicion, doubting that was truly a lesbian. A decade later, she has been called to the bar, having earned her law degree and worked in service of other desperate refugees with limited resources. Read her story below, as previously reported by the UK’s Attitude Magazine.
Lesbian refugee detained by UK Home Office celebrates becoming barrister
Barrister and former Attitude Pride Award winner Aderonke Apata has said she became an amateur legal expert while being held by the UK Home Office in a detention centre.
The LGBTQ+ activist and African Rainbow Family CEO was formally called to the bar, alongside dozens of her fellow newly qualified barristers earlier this autumn (13 October) after beginning her legal training with a law conversion course in 2018.
“It didn’t dawn on me until I walked into the hall where the bar ceremony was being held that this was something monumental on my journey,” Apata told the Guardian. “Even if I can just help a few people as a barrister over the next few years I will be satisfied.”
Her path to this point has been a long fight: Apata lived in limbo for thirteen years and was almost forcibly removed from the UK back to Nigeria if her asylum claim was rejected over belief she was lying about being a lesbian.
“It makes me really, really sick and I felt so humiliated, being called a liar, especially when it’s me, my person, under questioning,” Apata told Attitude in 2017 when she was handed an Attitude Pride Award, which honours everyday LGBTQ heroes.
During the asylum process, Apata was forced to share explicit footage of herself with her girlfriend to build evidence for her case.
“I had to do that. I was desperate” she told us at the time. “To share the video of me and my girlfriend having the privacy of our life, having sex, it’s dehumanising.”
Apata fled Nigeria because of the fact she’s gay and her life was in danger of persecution if she were to return to the country.
“Day-to-day life was hard,” Apata said. “You’d hear the preacher in church telling you that you were possessed by witchcraft, evil spirits; that you’d need to have an exorcism.”
From late 2011 to early 2013, she was detained in Yarl’s Wood [Immigration Removal Centre, a detention centre for foreign nationals awaiting deportation from the UK] in Bedfordshire.
During her time in the detention centre, Apata reveals she became privy to the complexities of the Home Office’s legal jargon and took it upon herself to explain terminology and document nuance to her fellow women detainees.
“The type of language the Home Office uses is very difficult to understand,” Apata explains. “But I learned quite a bit about immigration law from reading the other women’s refusal letters during the period of more than a year that I was locked up.”
“An escort told me I would be fine going back to Nigeria but I could not reply,” Apata remembers. ‘”I knew it would not be fine and that returning to Nigeria would mean death for me.”
With limited resources aiding her own case, Apata represented herself, fighting against her own removal and successfully wining herself freedom from the charter flight to Nigeria, and thankfully went on to secure her right to remain in the UK, [achieving refugee status in 2017].
[She began her legal training the following year, and was called to the bar this October. She] is now looking to specialise in immigration and human rights work.She told Attitude her desire is “to change the system,” especially in regards to LGBTQ+ people.
“I knew I needed to fight because I could not return to Nigeria. If I hadn’t been detained in Yarl’s Wood for so long, I probably would have pursued a career in public health,” she also noted.
“Without what the Home Office did to me, I wouldn’t be a barrister today. In a way, they trained me.”
Hear Aderonke Apata’s story from 2017 below:
