A 38-year-old Nigerian woman, who has claimed she faces death by stoning if returned to her home country, was yesterday granted a High Court order restraining the State from taking any steps to deport her before September 9th.
Mr Proinsias Ó Maolchaláin, counsel for Ms Nomota Bamidele, told Mr Justice de Valera she faced imminent deportation in that she had been directed to report yesterday to the Garda National Immigration Bureau.
He said the deportation order had been issued by the Department of Justice, and on July 27th she had been directed to attend at the office of the bureau which she had done.
She had been further directed to attend again yesterday at 10 a.m., and feared if she had done so without court intervention she would have been deported.
Mr Ó Maolchaláin said Ms Bamidele wished to challenge the legality of the deportation order on the grounds that her legal representatives had been refused sight of the bureau file relating to her, and that the order had failed to specify to which country she was to be deported.
He told Mr Justice de Valera that examination of the bureau file, to which she was entitled, may well throw up new grounds on which she could oppose her deportation.
"My client faces a death sentence under Sharia laws in the part of Nigeria in which she lived," Mr Ó Maolchaláin said.
In an out-of-court campaign to overturn her deportation, Ms Bamidele's supporters have claimed in a petition to the Minister for Justice that she could be stoned to death under Sharia laws because she had three children outside marriage with a Christian man.
The campaign organisers claim she was sentenced to death in her home country in August 2002, but had escaped from prison and had fled to Ireland seeking asylum.
Her application had been turned down by the Minister and, campaigners claimed, she and other Nigerians faced deportation yesterday.