Please help bring Martha home to her community and protect her human rights!

Martha has been part of our community for nearly 14 years; central to Nottingham interfaith projects, in peace work and women's empowerment and in her church. 

On Tuesday 06/08/13 Martha was taken with only the clothes she was wearing and detained under threat of deportation. Initially she was not able to call anyone, including legal help and was not given medicine for her high blood pressure. She still does not have adequate medicine and is ill. This is happening in the UK, now.  As a woman alone criminalised in a failing system that is neither fast nor fair, Martha needs and deserves our help.

Her friends are worried about her well-being. She has suffered from depression and is not sleeping. We feel the continuing lack of adequate medicine undermines her human rights and dignity as well as the validity of the legal process. We are also concerned that in order to visit her we have to be fingerprinted and body searched.

Martha came as a nurse from Malawi to the UK, selling all she had to be here. She stayed to retrain when her qualifications were not recognised in the UK. She has been waiting to receive her 'right to remain' so that she could complete training, doing vital volunteer work while waiting. Her application has been continually postponed in a process neither fast nor fair. At one point she was told her passport had been lost. Martha has become a victim of a failing procedure that took too long to reach decision and has criminalised her in the process. She has become an important member of the community in the time it has taken, yet as a woman alone she was an easy target.

For Martha Storey Nkhoma, the community she has been part of for nearly 14years is the family she has. From peace projects to challenging domestic abuse and supporting survivors of violence, to sharing a contagious love of cooking for people, to interfaith work, Martha is involved. We ask that you support her right to remain and uphold her human rights. We ask this both for Martha and the community who miss her and have so much to thank her for.

Thank-you for signing, please tell your friends too.