A woman who agreed to smuggle a 16-year-old girl into the State in “a crime of desperation” has been jailed for 16 months.
Anele Ngwenya (32) of Johannesburg, South Africa, came forward to Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on signed pleas of guilty from the District Court in relation to assisting the entry into the State of another person at Terminal Two, Dublin Airport on October 5th 2023.
She has no previous convictions from Ireland or from her own country.
Joseph Barnes BL, prosecuting, told the court that Ngwenya told gardaí that she agreed to travel with the teenager, on a fake passport for the child, after being requested to do so by members of her church in Johannesburg.
The teenager, who is a Congolese national, didn’t offer much information to the gardaí. She just claimed she was travelling with Ngwenya and said she had permission from her parents to travel.
Gardaí were unable to establish what the purpose of escorting the child was, but there were two people of interest in the investigation - one woman who was supposedly an aunt of the teenager and a man.
These people denied any knowledge of the child coming to Ireland, even though there was mobile communication between them both and the child. The girl is now under the care of Tusla.
An investigating garda told Mr Barnes that Ngwenya and the child arrived into Dublin Airport from Paris. The woman got off the plane separately to the child before she presented herself to Immigration Control.
The teenager went to another booth. Immigration officers became suspicious in relation to Ngwenya’s “purpose of travel”.
It was then established that they had travelled together - the teenager using a fake passport, which had been destroyed en route to Dublin.
Ngwenya was co-operative with gardaí.
She said she had been struggling for money, and she agreed to escort the child for payment. She was told she would be paid the equivalent of €971 and the travel arrangements were made for her.
Michael Bowman SC, defending, asked the court to accept that there was “no evidence of aggravating features” in the case.
He said his client was one of 13 siblings and that both her parents died of HIV when she was seven years old. She then went to live with her grandmother who died when she was 12 years old.
Ngwenya was then cared for by her grandfather, who was also taking care of some of her cousins. Counsel said Ngwenya was effectively then used as a domestic to look after these children.
She went to live with an older sister but that sister then passed away and for some time she was caring for her sister’s children.
Ngwenya has two children of her own who are now 13 and 11 years old. Mr Bowman said that her older daughter was brutally attacked in 2018 and has been left with injuries that required surgery.
The family live in a corrugated shack, he said.
Mr Bowman said his client acknowledges that she knew what she was doing was wrong and understood it was illegal but Ngwenya believed “she was facilitating the members of her church”.
“She was naïve but also quite desperate. She took the opportunity presented to her and is now paying the price for it,” counsel said.
Judge Martin Nolan said it is a serious offence to traffic a child in this way, but accepted it was “a crime of desperation”.
“She was desperate for some funds and temptation was put in her way and she succumbed to it,” Judge Nolan said before he added that it was “not an insidious human trafficking”.
“Her parents wanted the child to come here for a better life - as simple as that. She deserves to be punished but not an overly harsh imprisonment,” he said before he imposed a 16 month sentence.
