‘THEY’VE WRONGED ME’

The Portia Simpson Miller-led Government’s acceptance of a British man, who was deported from his birth country to the island in 2015, has raised questions about the level of due diligence undertaken by Jamaican authorities tasked with oversight of the process.

Fifty-four-year-old Richard Wallace, who was born in Paddington, London, to Jamaican parents, was deported to the country after serving 20 years for murder in a UK prison despite his insistence to British authorities that he was born in the country.

Both Wallace and his solicitor, Naga Kandiah, who has since filed a lawsuit on his behalf against the Home Office, criticised Jamaican authorities, who, they said, may have been strong-armed into accepting responsibility for him without confirming if he was, in fact, Jamaican.

The two argued that Jamaican authorities had no proof of him being a national.

“Mr Wallace’s plight was exacerbated from both sides – the Home Office and the Jamaican High Commission. Perhaps the Home Office had placed a lot of pressure on the high commission to accelerate their process without carrying out proper due diligence,” said Kandiah, a human rights and public law solicitor at MTC Solicitors.

“In 2015, Mr Wallace was deported to Jamaica under someone else’s name and date of birth, demonstrating the sheer lack of checking done before the high commission issued the emergency travel documents,” he told The Gleaner on Thursday.

Wallace said he was simply rounded up by “some white guys” and put on a flight to the island without seeing a travel document and that even after arriving in the country, none was handed to him.

The Gleaner contacted former Minister of National Security Peter Bunting, who said that it was not likely that Wallace’s case was brought to the attention of the Jamaican High Commission in the United Kingdom, which was then led by Aloun Assamba, given that he offered no objection to his deportation.

Further, Bunting said that Jamaica’s consular officers “were usually very careful about issuing emergency travel documents and would require clear evidence of Jamaican citizenship”.

“I specifically recall Consular Officers in Miami interviewing detainees in various detention centres in the Southern USA. This resulted in third-country citizens being taken off proposed deportation lists as they had been incorrectly identified as Jamaicans,” he said.

At the same time, however, Bunting said on the basis of Wallace’s story, it does appear that he suffered injustice and hardship.

Wallace told The Gleaner that his late parents, who were from Constitution Hill in St Andrew, travelled to the UK after World War II to help rebuild the country during the Windrush era.

He said that when he turned six, they returned to Jamaica, where he attended school until he was 18 years old.

The St Andrew Technical alumnus said he returned to the UK at age 18, where he went back to school before working in the auto field and where had a brief stint in the British Army.

But his troubles began when he was charged and convicted of murder at 26 years old.

After serving his time, he was deported to Jamaica, where he said life was difficult.

Wallace, father of one, said he was twice the victim of motor vehicle accidents and ended up sleeping in his cookshop on Red Hills Road after he fell on hard times.

He eventually sought and was issued a British passport by the British High Commission after it was finally accepted that he was not a Jamaican.

However, after he returned to the UK in 2018, he was arrested and jailed for travelling on a document the authorities believed was fraudulent.

He spent two years in prison and was released in 2020 after the Home Office, he said, realised it had made an error.

The British High Commission said it could not immediately comment on the matter when contacted by The Gleaner on Thursday.

“They have wronged me. They can’t give me back what they have taken from me,” said Wallace.

“Considering it all [restitution] would go some way in measuring up to justice. I can’t get back what I have lost and I just hope that this kind of thing does not happen to anybody else. I think I got off a bit light. Jamaica has its own problems and issues, but if it was another country, I could have died,” he told The Gleaner.

The “broken” man said that during his ordeal, he managed to attain his bachelor’s degree, and since his release, he has set up his catering business called Richphire Etrez, which specialises in seafood.

He now mentors young people at risk of getting involved with knife crime in south London.

kimone.francis@gleanerjm.com