Thursday 29 May 2008

Free Hicham Yezza

I'm sure many people will have heard abour the "terrorism" arrests at Nottingham University a couple of weeks ago. These arrests were made on completely unfounded charges when a student asked an employee at the university to print a document for his research which he couldn't afford to print himself.

After being held in custody for around 6 days the false charges were dropped and the student released. However, the employee of the University was kept in custody under immigration law. The employee is Hicham Yezza, a friend of a friend and a really great guy. It is currently being suggested that Hicham will be deported within a week, fast-tracking the process and giving Hicham little time to prepare his case. Labour MP Alan Simpson has called it "arbitrary deportation with no right to a proper hearing.”

Don't let an innocent exemplary citizen be fast tracked out of the country to save face for the police following an unneccessarily strong response to false terrorism allegations.

Read more and find out how you can help:
http://freehichamyezza.wordpress.com/

Read about it in the Independent:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/draconian-home-office-fasttracks-algerians-deportation-834031.html

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

There was a silent protest yesterday about this issue which Alan Simpson attended. Here's the photos: http://www.photosinthedark.com/Personal/March/index.html

And there's a Facebook group if you're a social networker... http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19662508427

Bill Carmichael said...

Sorry can't agree.
This has nothing to do with academic freedom
Yezza is not an academic and was not carrying out legitimate research.
Once the issue was reported to the police, it would have been a dereliction of duty not to investigate the matter thoroughly.
You can read more detail at http://billycarmichael.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

The issue of academic freedom wasn't mentioned in this blog post. We are highlighting Hicham's right to represent himself fairly in court rather than being hurriedly and unjustly deported following completely false terrorism charges.