At least 30 of the 41 Guinea-Bissau students who were detained at Lisbon airport have been released, the Guinea-Bissau Students Association in Lisbon (AEGBL) has announced on its Facebook page.
“More than 30 of the 41 students who had been detained at Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado airport since Friday are now free,” the association said in a statement yesterday evening.
The association also emphasised that it remains on site to “monitor the release of the students still detained, which is ongoing” and that it will provide more information soon.
This story has been further confused by a discrepancy in numbers. The Guinea-Bissau Students’ Association initially talked of 41 students, PSP police described only 34, and Guinea-Bissau’s secretary of state for the communities referred to 25.
João Domingos da Cunha of AEGBL’s Education Policy department refutes all these lesser numbers. The correct number was 41, he insists, adding that the ‘missing documents’ (terms of responsibility) required for entry into Portugal are ‘not difficult to obtain’. Thus hopes are that all remaining students still held at Lisbon airport will be able to get them before facing deportation on Friday.
These young people are all enrolled in Portuguese higher education, with their names on the list of students starting this academic year. Even so, their passage into the country was blocked due to ‘lack of proof that their aim was to study, as well as lack of means of subsistence’.
Source material: LUSA
