STRASBOURG, France (CN) — The European Court of Human Rights disclosed Tuesday that it was tricked by a 25-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker who lied to authorities, including faking a death certificate, to remain in Finland with her two children.
Nooralhooda Al-Janabi first appeared before the rights court to allege that her 50-year-old father had been fatally shot in Iraq only weeks after Finland rejected his asylum application and deported him.
The case was widely condemned across Europe, and the Strasbourg-based rights court ordered Finland to pay Al-Janabi 24,500 euros ($30,000) for violating the European Convention of Human Rights, which protects the civil and political rights of Europeans, and established the court in 1953. The 2019 ruling stated that "the applicant's father would not have returned to Iraq if an enforceable expulsion decision had not been issued against him.”
Finland's then-Interior Minister Maria Ohisalo called the decision at the time "extremely weighty and significant."
"It is a very serious matter that our country that is governed by the rule of law has failed, in this case, to protect the most important right of all, the safeguarding of life," Ohisalo had said in a statement. "I immediately raised this matter at the ministry, and we will look carefully at how we can ensure that this will not happen again."
This admonishment fell apart, however, after the break-up of Al-Janabi and her now-ex-husband, Qahtan Ghawi Hussein. Though Al-Janabi had secured a residency permit in 2018 based on allegations of her father's murder, Hussein told Finish authorities in 2020 that Al-Janabi had tricked him as well and only just learned that his father-in-law was still alive.
After the Iraqi government confirmed that the death certificate for Al-Janabi's father was fake and that he was alive, Al-Janabi and Hussein, who is also an Iraqi refugee, were each convicted of fraud and sentenced to nearly two years in jail.
Helsinki then applied to the rights court for a revision of the earlier conviction. “It is also clear from the documents submitted to the Court that these new facts were unknown to the Court when the judgment of 14 November 2019 was delivered,” the seven-judge panel wrote Tuesday.
In 2020, more than 4,000 people, 40% of whom were from Iraq, applied for asylum in the nordic country. Around half of refugees were successful. Applications are down dramatically from the height of the European migrant crisis, when 28,000 people applied for asylum.
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