Clegg failing to keep promise on detained children

The Refugee Council has criticised Nick Clegg for failing to keep his promise to end the detention of children in immigration centres after the Home Office announced that 17 young people were held last month.

Read more

Source: Independent

Landing in Dover report on reception of children

Source: Free Movement

Today’s report by the Children’s Commissioner, Landing in Dover, exposes gross double standards by UK Border Agency officials. The report reveals the existence of a so called ‘gentleman’s agreement’ operating at the south coast ports whereby an unaccompanied child who did not make an immediate asylum claim would be returned to France within 24 hours of arrival in the UK with no welfare or other assessment and no referral to social services.

The agreement was in place from at least 1995 through to November 2011, when the Children’s Commissioner discovered the existence of the agreement. At this point the practice was halted immediately by the new Chief Executive of UKBA, the inappropriately named Rob Whiteman.

The practice of returning unaccompanied children with no welfare assessment is so obviously in breach of the duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children imposed by section 55 of the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009 that it beggars belief that UKBA officials continued with the practice. The practice was also obviously in breach of all the UKBA guidance to its staff about trafficking, which encourages staff to be proactive and alert in seeking to identify potential victims of trafficking.

Not only that, but the investigation found that the UK Border Agency is still detaining children despite Government commitments to the contrary:

The report finds that children are in fact not currently being held for the ‘shortest appropriate period of time’. Rather they are detained whilst significant interviews that will inevitably bear on their prospects of being granted permission to stay in the UK are conducted. From the cases we have considered in preparation of this report, we find that the local authority is only informed of the child’s arrival several hours after initial detention and well into the interviewing process. The report concludes that interviewing children in depth immediately on arrival is unnecessary and not in their best interests and should be reconsidered.

Even where children said that they were tired or ill UKBA staff would apparently carry on regardless and press on with further interviews without referring the child to social services. The report identifies the following failings:

• Children are generally not fit for interview due to illness, hunger, tiredness, fear or a combination of these factors.
• The length of time between being placed into detention and release into care is too long. This is due to both the numbers of interviews routinely undertaken and the waiting times between the interviews.
• Telephone interpreting is generally used at the interviews and is not, in our view, ‘fit for purpose’.
• Children are in practice unable to instruct a legal representative or in most cases have an independent Responsible Adult present during interviews and yet the interviews can be relied upon by UKBA in the asylum decision.
• Even in the absence of a legal representative or independent adult, children are required to sign the screening interview record, confirm its contents are correct and confirm that they have understood legal warnings and instructions from the immigration officer.

This is all pretty horrifying, and it should inform judges and lawyers when they consider whether weight should be attached to information from screening interviews of unaccompanied children.

The good intentions of Ministers, senior managers and the people who write the UKBA policy documents are all very well, but what matters is what happens on the ground. Culture change is always hard but the UK Border Agency has a long, long way go before it can realistically assert that its staff take children’s welfare seriously.

Trafficked children sent to France upon arrival at UK

A report by the Children’s Commissioner for England has revealed that from 1995 onwards, children who arrived at Dover on their own were sent immediately to France as part of a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ between the two border agencies.

Read more

Source: Guardian

Fostering asylum seekers: Their past is a foreign country

Anne King has fostered children for two decades. But she found looking after young asylum seekers more challenging – and rewarding – than she could ever have imagined

Read more

Source:Independent

Important new case on children

It’s a case

In a judgment handed down yesterday HH Judge Anthony Thornton QC has given some very interesting guidance on the scope of the duty under section 55 of the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009 following the guidance of the Supreme Court in the landmark case of ZH (Tanzania) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] UKSC 4. The case is R (on the application of Tinizaray) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] EWHC 1850 (Admin).

The facts are not that unusual. An Ecuadorian woman entered the UK illegally in 2001 with her mother. She was pregnant at that time and gave birth in 2002. The child grew up and attended school in the UK and had never had any contact with her father or with Ecuador generally. All three made a joint application under Article 8 ECHR. The application was refused on several grounds on several occasions. The reasons included:

Read more

Source: Free Movement

Strategic Legal Fund now operational

A Strategic Legal Fund for Refugee Children and Young People has been set up to fund strategic litigation on the issue of… I think you can guess from the title. It is funded by the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund and managed by MigrationWork. An expert panel has been set up (disclosure: somehow, I’m on it) to assess applications on a monthly basis. Applications for funding are now open and welcomed.

A description of the purpose of the fund is best lifted from the website:

The SLF supports strategic legal work: work which goes beyond securing justice for an individual to make a significant contribution to law, practice and procedures that upholds and promotes the rights of refugee and asylum seeking children and young people (up to the age of 21)…

The SLF will test a new model for supporting legal work in the UK by providing flexible and responsive funding. It will distribute up to £300,000 to eligible providers of specialist level legal services to undertake a non-profit making piece of work which does not qualify for public funding. Initially, cases in areas of law relevant to refugee children, including asylum, immigration, human rights, community care, housing, education, discrimination and health, may be supported. See How to apply for more details.

Strategic litigation in the field of immigration and asylum  is all but dead in the water after the demise of RMJ and IAS so this looks like a very interesting experiment. All involved know that the fund cannot repair the damage done to children’s cases by cuts to legal aid, but the idea of trying to use a relatively small amount of money to bring about structural change is an interesting one.

Children’s Society condemns continuing child border detention

In May 2010 the Government announced that it would end the immigration detention of children, but it is failing to do so says the Children’s Society.

Between May and the end of August 2011, 697 children were held at all Greater London and South East ports. Almost one third were unaccompanied children. This could mean as many as 2,000 children could be detained each year.

Full story

Source: Ekklesia

Age Disputed Young Asylum Seekers

A recent report by the Welsh Refugee Council describes the experience of children and young people whose lives are left in limbo, outside of society’s protective mechanisms because their age is disputed by the UK Border Agency or local authorities. Young Lives in Limbo: the protection of age disputed young people in Wales, examines the difficulties faced by children and young people who arrive in Wales without any documents that would prove their age, and makes recommendations to all stakeholders to ensure that the age assessment process in Wales moves away from a culture that is unfair, inequitable and placing vulnerable children at risk; to one which places the ‘child’s best interests’, needs, and vulnerability at the heart of the assessment.

To get your copy go to http://bit.ly/oghXrO
Tell WRC what you think on http://www.facebook.com/Welshrefcouncil
Follow WRC on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/welshrefcouncil

‘Asexual, Apolitical Beings’

‘Asexual, Apolitical Beings’: The Interpretation of Children’s Identities and Experiences in the UK Asylum System by H Crawley  in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2011 explores the experiences of separated asylum-seeking children and considers the  implications of dominant understandings of ‘childhood’ for the ways in which the children’s experiences  of persecution and violence are interpreted in the UK asylum system.

Britain is still no refuge for refugees

Despite Nick Clegg’s promises, child detention never quite went away and is now making a comeback.

Read more

Source: Guardian

Next Page »