Durban - The 92-year-old KwaZulu-Natal South Coast woman who is fighting to stay with her daughter in the UK has turned to crowd-funding to finance her battle with British authorities.
Myrtle Cothill, formerly of Port Shepstone, needs the money to take her case to the European Court of Human Rights.
Cothill visited her daughter, Mary Wills, in the UK in February 2014. She realised after she arrived that she wanted to stay even though her 6-month visitor visa had expired.
The British Home Office said her visitor visa could not be switched and she should have made her application for an extended visa while she was still in South Africa.
Cothill, a widow, does not have any surviving family in South Africa. She also suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Her daughter cannot return home because she relinquished her South African citizenship when she became British in 1998.
Wills’s husband, David, also suffers from COPD as well as Parkinson’s disease. Wills has been taking care of them.
Cothill’s barrister, Jan Doerfel, has launched a petition online seeking support for the reformation of the Immigration Rule on adult dependent relatives. The petition on www.change.org has so far received 51 328 signatures.
Doerfel said on the website: “Myrtle’s position is still highly precarious: having used up all court avenues in the UK, she can be removed at any time. The only current legal route to challenge Myrtle’s removal is by taking her case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in France and, for that, the family need your help to raise funds.”
Wills said the cost would be about R423 000.
“The situation is a living nightmare for all of us, but too much to bear for my mom who is constantly afraid, has immense trouble sleeping and has lost 9kg over the last months.”
She said they had a few weeks to submit her mother’s case to the court.
Daily News