Posted on 10/17/2003 2:26:31 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
A six-figure legal battle between a family of Lithuanian asylum seekers and a London council was essentially a row over a flight of stairs.
The Anufrijeva family claimed that a steep staircase in a flat on a south London estate infringed their human rights by preventing their infirm grandmother from playing a full part in family life.
The battle was fought by an army of lawyers at a cost of more than £100,000 before some of the most senior judges in the country.
One of the judges, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, spoke of the "unconscionably high" costs the proceedings had run up.
The family - Vladimiras Anufrijeva, his wife Ala, their three children and Mrs Anufrijeva's mother, Matriona Kuzjeva - arrived in London in August 1998 claiming political asylum.
Mr Anufrijeva said that as an ethnic Russian he faced persecution in the newly independent Lithuania.
Southwark borough council gave the family a two-floor maisonette in a block that was earmarked for demolition on the notorious North Peckham estate. But the family complained that the accommodation was unsuitable because the bedrooms and bathroom were separated from the kitchen and living room by steep stairs which Mrs Kuzjeva found difficult.
They instructed lawyers to fight for better accommodation for the grandmother. After she died in 2001, the family continued to pursue an action for damages on behalf of her estate.
In 1999 the council had offered a three-bedroom flat at Comus House which the Anufrijeva family rejected because the bathroom was too small.
In 2001 the family was offered an ivy-covered Victorian house at Gordon Road, Camberwell, which their lawyers say was "infinitely superior" to the Peckham maisonette in a block now full of squatters and drug dealers.
But again the family said no because of "several steep steps".
In the High Court last year, during a claim for damages by the family, Mrs Anufrijeva told Mr Justice Newman that she and her family had had "a lovely house" in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. In his ruling dismissing the claim, the judge compared that "comfortable and substantial" home with the council flat they came to live in.
The flat was "a maisonette with no garden and in a block scheduled to be demolished". The Vilnius property was "a large timber-framed house, having more than adequate accommodation for the whole family, with a large garden, including an orchard and a vegetable garden".
Family life in Vilnius centred on the kitchen, with Mrs Kuzjeva cooking, caring for the children and helping in the garden. But journalists who visited Lithuania found a different picture.
Reporters from The Telegraph said that 24 Markuciu Street was a damp, poorly equipped and ramshackle eight-room house that had been converted into three apartments. The orchard was a small garden with three rather sad trees.
Neighbours queried Mr Anufrijeva's claim that he had been persecuted. He has a conviction for embezzlement dating from 1983. Ole Hansen, his British lawyer, says that he was convicted under the Soviet regime as punishment for annoying the management in the factory where he worked by standing up for his rights.
Mr Hansen has fought hundreds of cases against Southwark council on housing and community care issues and says he has lost only three.
The Anufrijevas are not particularly litigious, he says, but like many of his clients have to take multiple actions against the council to have their rights recognised. The family's eldest child, Nadezda, 25, works part-time for Mr Hansen's law firm.
This year the House of Lords ruled that the Home Office had abused its power in depriving her of income support while she waited for a ruling on her asylum application.
The family has been refused asylum and is living in a flat on the Rockingham estate in Southwark.
The Anufrijevas are not particularly litigious
and the Red Sox are not particularly cursed.
And why are they still in the country, living off the taxpayers......?
This family needs a huge injection of plain old gratitude.
You haven't seen San Francisco. We've got homeless shelters with lockers, showers, recreation, washing machines (free soap, naturally), health care, etc. - oh, they also get free money.
Maybe, besides being an embezzler and an an annoyance to the management at the factory, Anufrijeva was not a "particularly litigious" "ethnic Russian" with the PTB at home too?
The grants and privileges of asylum can be revoked, can't they? Maybe someone ought to tell him?
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