Callous disregard by the British government for the human rights of asylum seekers and migrants indefinitely detained is leading to tragic consequences for many of them.

So say campaigners in a submission to an enquiry into the treatment of asylum seekers by Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR).

The submission, presented by the Campaign to Close Campsfield on behalf of the Barbed Wire Britain Network to End Refugee and Migrant Detention, is backed up by extensive research. It argues that there is an increasing overlap in the injustices suffered by detained asylum seekers and some immigration detainees.

The submission reproduced here provides powerful ammunition for all those campaigning on these issues, and underlines the importance of support for the October 7 Day of Action (see p 23).

Submission to the JCHR

1. It is wrong to imprison for any length of time people without their being charged with an offence, or brought before a magistrate or judge, or being found guilty of an offence and sentenced to be imprisoned.

2. It is wrong to imprison anyone for an indefinite period.

3. These considerations bear particular weight in the case of asylum seekers, many of whom have been through hard, often traumatic experiences that have led them to exercise their right to seek asylum in this country.

4. This treatment of detained asylum seekers (and other detained migrants) is grossly unjust discrimination against them compared with the treatment afforded other residents of the UK.

5. As well as its being unjust-indeed partly as a result of this-the detention of people in these circumstances is very damaging to their morale, self-respect and health. There is considerable anecdotal evidence of this from detainees themselves (e.g. Voices From Detention II, Barbed Wire Britain, 2006), from their visitors, and from medical researchers (Mina Fazel and Derrick Silove: “Detention of refugees”, British Medical Journal, 2006: 332: 251-252).

As Dr Christina Pourgourides has put it: “Detention recreates the oppression people have fled from and is a hostile response to asylum seekers. It is associated with stress and distress, but whether that is a mental health disorder is debatable” (Royal College of Psychiatrists annual conference, July 6, 2003).

6. Complaints by detainees concerning inadequate medical care are frequent.

They range from the universal dishing out by medical staff of paracetamol to cover all eventualities, to neglect of serious conditions, and failure to take sufficiently seriously the statements of detainees about their health.

7. The depths of despair to which detainees may be driven by the fact of their detention is reflected in the increasing number of suicides (15 in the last 5 years) by immigration detainees, and the increasing number of instances of self-harm (Driven to Desperate Measures, Institute of Race Relations, 2006).

8. We do believe that families are indeed being targeted for detention prior to deportation because they are easy targets and make it easier for the government to raise the statistic of numbers of “failed asylum seekers” who are deported.

9. It is wrong in particular to imprison children.

10. It is apparent – although the government fails to provide proper statistics – that “ordinary” prisons are being used to detain immigration detainees, despite the fact that a few years ago the Home Secretary rightly denounced the practice as unacceptable and said it would end.

11. The UNHCR guideline is that immigration detention should be imposed only in exceptional circumstances and furthermore in any case should not exceed 48 hours. Practice in the UK is so grossly at variance with this advice that this deserves attention.

12. Many asylum applicants are detained despite the fact that they are not liable to deportation as their cases are still being considered by the government. As well as being wrong this is in breach of the government’s own stated policy.

13. The initial decision to detain is made by quite junior immigration officers. This is just the first encounter of an asylum applicant with the “culture of disbelief” and the often arbitrary decision-making that pervade the asylum regime in the UK. Many reports have referred to this phenomenon, e.g. Seeking Asylum Is Not a Crime: Detention of People Who Have Sought Asylum, Amnesty, 2005).

14. The same culture of disbelief can be observed in operation in the immigration courts when applications for bail and for refugee status are made.

There is no apparent accountability for the decisions made by immigration judges. There is no record available to the public of what is said in court. Country information provided by reliable sources (Amnesty International, UNHCR, etc.) is often ignored.

Detainees are frequently sent back to known conflict areas, e.g. Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Sri Lanka, with no regard to their experiences in those countries and what will happen to them.

15. Reductions in available legal aid and the speeding up of procedures have in the past few years made the asylum regime progressively more draconian and difficult for the individual asylum applicant to challenge, particularly when he or she is held in a detention centre. The process of detrimental changes continues even now. This would appear to undermine the UK’s obligation seriously to entertain individual applications for asylum.

16. Government statements that the decision to detain is reviewed regularly in each individual case are widely believed to be so wide of the mark that they would be better not made.

17. In general, rights for immigration detainees exist in print only and lack implementation. In the words of a lawyer who was detained: “It would be a delight to see at least some of them in action” (The Rights of Immigration Detainees, Barbed Wire Britain, October 2006).

18. Migrants are frequently moved from centre to centre, disrupting support they may receive from visitors, lawyers, etc.

There were on average 34 movements of detainees every day during 2004 from and to Campsfield, which has space for 190 detainees. The number of 25 given by the IMB for Campsfield for 2005 excludes visits to hospitals, court hearings, interviews, etc. No reasons are given for this merry-go-round but it must be lucrative for the transport providers.

19. The personnel of the private companies that transport detainees between centres and to airports often inflict violence on the detainees. Covert television reporting has exposed this, and reports by organisations such as the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture (Harm on Removal: Excessive Force Against Failed Asylum Seekers, October 2004) and Bail for Immigration Detainees have given details of individual instances; there are civil legal cases in progress that arise out of this practice.

Newspaper reporting (again, of necessity, covert as the government is strongly opposed to reporting of what happens inside detention centres) and detainees’ accounts also report the racism of some detention guards.

20. Arising from the above, and always ensuring that detainees’ own interests and wishes as regards anonymity are observed, detention centres should be opened up to independent reporters and researchers.
21. We are most concerned that the fourfold increase under this government of the use of detention appears to have been driven in part by the interests of commercial companies offering to build and/or run detention centres. See Christine Bacon: The Evolution of Immigration Detention in the UK: The Involvement of Private Prison Companies, working paper 27, RSC, Oxford; also VOICES II, introduction).

Furthermore, companies are awarded contracts here when they have been heavily criticised for their operations both here and in other parts of the world.

22. The JCHR inquiry is into the treatment of asylum seekers, but much of the above applies also in the case of other migrants detained who are not seeking asylum but may be “overstayers” or otherwise “undocumented migrants”.

They are often seized from their workplaces or, like asylum seekers, from their homes or even in the street for paperwork irregularities. They are parted from their families and possessions, and taken by security van to a detention centre with no information about what will happen to them next. They may have come here legally, established a family, and stayed on without regularising their position. Removing a person to a country they have not been in for maybe eight or more years is a punitive process that breaks up families and creates dependence on the state for those left with no breadwinner (information from Bail for Immigration Detainees).

23. Given the foreign nationality and the ethnicity of asylum detainees, the catalogue of injustices in this area-when compared with what faces other residents of the UK-amount to a systematic practice of racial discrimination by the state.

24. In terms of the combination of the numbers of asylum seekers detained, the lack of judicial oversight, and the duration of detention, the UK’s practice in the matter of detaining asylum seekers is among the worst, if not the worst, in the European Union.

Recommendation: That the Joint Committee on Human Rights should declare that government policy on detention of asylum seekers is incompatible with exercising the recognition of human rights.