Lesbian refugee detained by Home Office celebrates becoming barrister
"Without what the Home Office did to me I wouldn’t be a barrister today," says Aderonke Apata.
Barrister and former Attitude Pride Award winner Aderonke Apata has said she became an amateur legal expert while detained by the 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 month (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 on a flight 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 honour 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 detention centre, 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 granting herself freedom from the charter flight to Nigeria and thankfully went on to secure her right to remain in the UK.
Apata then got legal status later in 201, 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.”
The Attitude Pride Awards, in association with Magnum, return to London’s Langham Hotel on 22 June 2023. Hear Aderonke Apata’s story from 2017 below: