A report on the UK Border Agency’s management of foreign national offenders bears little reaction to the press’ coverage.

‘The 5,000 crooks we can’t deport’: was the Sun headline which was repeated, with more or less polite variations, across Britain’s press on 27 October, from the Express to the Guardian, the message all the papers deemed to be the story behind Chief Inspector of the UKBA John Vine’s report.[1] The message conveyed by the headline is one of embodied menace: threatening alien criminals who can’t be got rid of roaming our streets.

This is not the main story in Vine’s report. He does complain that although UKBA officials know how difficult and time-consuming it is to get emergency travel documents from certain embassies, they appear incapable of starting the process during prisoners’ sentences, so that deportations are needlessly delayed for months. But his main complaint against UKBA is the ‘fear and reluctance to release’ FNPs at the end of their sentence, which means that 97 per cent of a sample of 97 prisoners were held under Immigration Act powers at the end of their sentence and that by January 2011 the average length of post-sentence detention had gone up to 190 days – that is six months and ten days. Over a quarter of those detained are now held for over a year. Only 109 FNPs were released by immigration officers, while over 1,100 were released on bail by the courts (which are themselves extremely wary of releasing persons whom the UKBA wants to deport). Vine refers to a ‘culture where detention is the norm’ despite official policy of a presumption in favour of liberty, where authority to detain resides with a fairly junior officer, while authority to release must be sought from a far higher grade. It is, too, a culture of disrespect, where FNPs are frequently left in the dark about the progression of their cases, and sometimes about the reason for the decision to deport them; where confidential details of unrelated third parties are contained in files for no reason and details of acquitted foreign nationals are not deleted from the system, in disregard of data protection laws. The report deprecated these failings, and recommended that UKBA get better at releasing FNPs.

Vine found a similar aversion to risk, and disrespect for FNPs’ rights, in the way UKBA staff deal with their applications to stay. Nearly a third of FNPs’ appeals were successful in the year to January 2011, mostly on human rights grounds. Bearing in mind how cautious the courts are about allowing offenders’ appeals against deportation, this is a high proportion of appeals (425 in number). UKBA had granted permission to stay to only 151 offenders, prompting Vine to recommend that the officials pay more regard to factors such as family ties, the welfare of UK-born children, and conditions in the proposed destination country to reduce the disparity.

But what the inspector sees as a defect in officials’ attitudes and training, the right-wing press and politicians see as a defect in the courts, which they claim are allowing too many human rights appeals by undeserving criminals. No matter what inspectors say, and no matter how meticulously the courts assess the evidence before releasing FNPs or allowing their appeals, the media bang the same old anti-Human Rights Act drum, ever more insistently. Foreign prisoners don’t have rights, they say, providing vociferous support for home secretary Theresa May and immigration minister Damien Green’s mission to allow family and private life rights to be diluted or bypassed in order to deport FNPs.

Senior judges captured

And now, Britain’s senior judges are repeating the mantra. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, and the presiding Supreme Court judge, Lord Phillips, neither known as the strongest human rights defenders in the judiciary, told the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights that the UK’s courts should not follow rulings of the European Court of Human Rights so closely.[2] Philips also claimed that Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which requires public bodies to respect individuals’ private and family life, was ‘baffling’ for judges, despite rulings by the Supreme Court under the leadership of his predecessor Lord Bingham which were hailed as models of clarity, humanity and wisdom. The two judges told the committee that the European Human Rights Court should have to give permission before cases are brought there – a baffling observation in the light of the fact that well over 95 per cent of applications to the court are rejected at a very preliminary stage and a further four per cent or so are weeded out as ‘inadmissible’. Echoing the campaign of the Right, the judges called for much greater freedom for British judges in interpreting and applying the Human Rights Convention.

—-
FOOTNOTE

[1] John Vine, Chief Inspector of UKBA, ICIUKBA Annual Report (http://icinspector.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/ICIUKBA-Annual-Report-2010_11-final-web.pdf) (pdf file,1.3mb). [2] ‘UK courts following European human rights rulings too strictly, judges warn’, Guardian, 15 November 2011.

Read more

Source: Cherwell.org

* Monday 16 January 2012, 6-7.30pm

* Senate House, room S265, 2nd floor, University of London, Russell Square, London WC1

Speaker:

* Pam Fraser Solomon

Organised by the Black & Asian Studies Association, in conjunction with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. No registration necessary. For more information, email: Marika.Sherwood@sas.ac.uk (mailto: Marika.Sherwood@sas.ac.uk).

Institute of Commonwealth Studies ( http://commonwealth.sas.ac.uk/)

Chakrabarti will address the group of 18 refugees from London have spent the last six months launching their own campaigns on behalf of their community organisations to tackle a variety of social problems such as poverty and destitution of asylum seekers, youth violence and gang crime in London, and domestic violence. They also campaigned for positive change, such as engaging refugees in the political process and improving education opportunities for refugee women.

Read more

Source: Refugee Council

Music can be used to open up channels of communication with patients disturbed by a range of conditions, writes SYLVIA THOMPSON

WHAT CAN you do if your mind is too confused to permit normal conversation? How can you occupy a social space – in which to communicate with others – if you can’t speak? How can you share your distress with someone else if you can’t distinguish between internal voices in your head from those around you?

Read more

A conference for those working with migrants and wishing to engage with the media and give migrants a voice.

* Thursday 6 October 2011, 11am-5pm

* Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund Offices, County Hall, Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 7PB

Programme includes:

* The launch of an online media toolkit

* A showcase of the work carried out by project partners

* Workshops

—-
FOOTNOTE

Organised by the EPIM Migrants & Media Project partners. A more detailed programme will be issued shortly. This event is free, but booking is essential. To register, email: empowerment@migrants.org.uk (mailto: empowerment@migrants.org.uk) by no later than 3 October 2011.

The Refugee Council is looking for someone who may be willing to take part in a short film we are making for our 60^th Anniversary year and to commemorate the 60^th Anniversary of the UN Convention for Refugees.   We are looking for someone who came here as a refugee in the 1960’s and settled here.

In practical terms it will involve a couple of hours of a person’s time at a location convenient to them.

It would involve talking about the person’s experience of coming to the UK, and how the person was able to rebuild their life here thanks to the UN Convention for Refugees.  The actual camera time will be very short because this is only a short film.

The main aim of our film is to highlight the lives saved by the UN Convention over the last 60 years and in the future, as well as to highlight the work of the Refugee Council. We plan to raise awareness’ and to help us build support for the important work we do.

Please email us as soon as possible if you can help!

* Tuesday 6 September 2011 – Tuesday 4 October 2011

* At venues across the Midlands

The Festival will be screening a wide range of films that investigate the notion of human rights in the 21st Century as measured against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For more information see the programme of events (http://www.birmingham-film.org/page/news/153).