Children support classmates at risk of being deported to Africa

A YOUNG brother and sister at a primary school in Yorkshire are being supported by their classmates after it emerged they may be deported.

Pupils at St Catherine's Catholic Primary School in Burngreave, Sheffield, have produced a banner showing why they want Adaku Okpara, seven, and her brother Enoch, five, to stay in Britain.

School staff said they had been using the plight of Adaku and Enoch to teach pupils about human rights issues after they, their one-year-old sister Urenna and mum Mildred, 25, were told they are to be deported to Nigeria.

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Miss Okpara claims she fled her homeland in 2005 after the abduction and murder of her partner Ejike by members of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra because he had refused to join the rebels.

A petition with 350 signatures backing her asylum bid has been sent to the Home Office and more than 70 letters have been written by pupils' parents.

Headteacher Fiona Rigby said: "To give some sense of meaning to the issue of human rights the school council has been learning about the plight of the Okpara family and held an assembly on this subject based around the two children at our school.

"The other children have produced a banner, where they have drawn round their hands and written messages of support for the family and discussed how their human rights are being threatened."

A spokesman for the Home Office said it could not comment on an individual immigration cases.

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