Mahmud Snunu, his wife Mona and six of their children – most of them now adults – arrived in Ireland in December 2016 from Greece under the Irish Refugee Protection Programme. Now Irish citizens, they live in CoTheir daughter, Nouralhuda , however, is in the Kuala Lumpur International Airport detention centre, with her three children Ahmet , Mohamed and Rital . They are being held separately from her husband, Hussin Ibrahim, in the same centre, and face deportation back to Syria.
They were stopped at Kuala Lumpur airport in May trying to board a plane to Qatar, from where they planned to travel to Ireland, using false United Arab Emirates passports. UAE citizens do not need a visa to visit Ireland, while Syrian passport-holders do. The family applied as sponsors to bring them to Ireland on the grounds of family reunification, but was turned down in September chiefly on the grounds that Nouralhuda is an adult, and so falls outside the criteria of immediate family, and because they were unable to demonstrate ability to support them. They have appealed.
Among other reasons for the family reunification being refused were discrepancies in the English spelling of the family’s Arabic surname on different documents; failure to translate WhatsApp messages between Nouralhuda and her family, necessary to demonstrate a family connection, into English; and failure to submit birth and marriage certificates. The family says some of these got left in Syria.