Demands for scrutiny of restraint techniques

Campaigners have called for better scrutiny of the restraint techniques used on children when they are being deported, after discrepancies about the number of times they have been used have emerged.

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Source: Children and Young People Now

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Guardian: Concerns over new ‘pre-departure accommodation centre’

Asylum Seekers deported back to the first EU countries they entered

Awet spreads his hands out and shows us his scarred fingertips. “He burned his fingertips so he could apply for asylum like a new person,” explains his friend.

A group of men are gathered in the back room of a large squat on the outskirts of Rome, talking about their struggle to beat the European asylum system. They explain that it is common for asylum seekers to burn their fingers, so the fingerprint record of their entry into Italy is destroyed.

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Source: Guardian

Tamil returns: ‘UKBA is not aware of any difficulties’

By Frances Webber| Institute of Race Relations

The deportation of up to fifty Tamil refused asylum seekers to Sri Lanka on a charter flight on 28 September once again focused attention on what happens to those returned to torturing states, and who monitors them.

The charter flight went ahead in the teeth of warnings of torture from organisations including the Sri Lanka Campaign, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Freedom from Torture (formerly the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture), and minus a number of passengers who had managed to secure injunctions to prevent their removal. Freedom from Torture has seen around 400 new Tamil patients in the two years since the LTTE’s defeat, many of whom bear scars of recent torture, and Human Rights Watch said, ‘The Sri Lankan government continues to show shocking disregard for the due process rights of anyone deemed linked to the Tamil Tigers. Those detained have been tortured and “disappeared”.’[1]

In a 2007 asylum case, the Tribunal observed that, for Tamils returned to Sri Lanka, coming from London (or another centre of fundraising for the Tamil Tigers), having made an asylum claim abroad, lack of an ID card and illegal departure from Sri Lanka were all factors which could give rise to suspicion of LTTE support and increased the risk of harsh interrogation and torture. In a 26 September letter sent to the High Court in order to pre-empt injunctions before the charter operation, the UK Border Agency (UKBA) claimed that up-to-date evidence about Sri Lanka indicated that these risks for refused asylum seekers had reduced. Strikingly, it did not claim that the risks had disappeared. According to a Guardian report, though, UKBA claimed that ‘arrangements to monitor the welfare of deportees’ had been sub-contracted to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). When the IOM denied that it would be monitoring returnees, the UKBA fell back on assurances given by Sri Lankan intelligence officers that they did not torture returned asylum seekers – the officers alleged that many Sri Lankans had inflicted wounds on themselves in order to support asylum claims. And in a letter to Freedom from Torture’s head Keith Best, UKBA said that deportees were given the contact details of the British High Commission in Colombo, ‘and may contact them if they require any assistance’.[2]

It is alarming that UKBA can quote, apparently uncritically, Sri Lankan intelligence officials’ accusations of self-mutilating Tamils in support of its claim that returned Tamils will be safe in their hands. The Agency clearly accepted that Tamils who were suspected of LTTE connections were being tortured in the past; how, then, can it give any credence at all to the assurances of the perpetrators that it never happened? And what is the use of the contact details for Our Man in Colombo – who has absolutely no power to intervene to stop the ill-treatment by a foreign state of one of its own nationals?

The dishonesty of these glib assurances is breathtaking. But it is not new; it is reminiscent of the experiences of Algerian national security deportees being returned to the jurisdiction of their brutal intelligence services under so-called diplomatic assurances which the Algerian government refused either to make official or to have independently monitored. Deportees and their relatives were given the contact details of the British Embassy in Algeria in case of difficulty. But when relatives rang, distraught, saying their sons were being held incommunicado, all the Embassy staff could do was to engage in polite fencing with Algerian diplomats. They had no right to enter the feared HQ of the security police where the men were held, much less visit or speak to them. And although the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) had said the assurances could be policed by groups like Amnesty International and by Algerian human rights lawyers, Amnesty’s reports of endemic torture were marginalised and the Algerian lawyers’ allegations of their clients’ torture rejected.

The Tamils being returned now do not even have the minimal protection of such diplomatic assurances. The stark reality brought home by these deportations is that the government is not interested in monitoring the welfare of deportees; it neither knows nor cares about the fate of those it returns to torturing states.

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FOOTNOTE

[1] Ian Cobain, ‘Torture charity calls on UK to halt deportation flight to Sri Lanka’ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/27/torture-charity-call-sri-lanka-deportation), Guardian, 26 September 2011; Sri Lanka Campaign Newsletter 28 September 2011. [2] Ian Cobain, ‘UK not monitoring safety of Tamils deported to Sri Lanka’ ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/sep/28/uk-not-monitoring-safety-tamils), Guardian, 29 September 2011.

Nigerian mother assaulted on deportation flight

Human rights campaigners are alarmed after reports of a Nigerian woman allegedly being beaten by six escorts in front of her three children on a deportation flight bound for Italy.

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Source: Guardian

Horn migrants beaten, deported, imprisoned

(IRIN) – Near the coastal town of Mtwara, Tanzania’s border with Mozambique is marked only by the River Ruvuma which is wide and relatively shallow at this point just before it drains into the Indian Ocean. Young men loll in small, wooden boats checking their cell phones and waiting for passengers to ferry across to the other side, but business has been slow in the last two months since groups of migrants desperate to complete a journey that began thousands of kilometres to the north stopped arriving at the river’s banks.

This report online: http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=93759

Child asylum-seekers should stay in Britain, says Emma Thompson

Emma Thompson has criticised Government policy towards child asylum seekers, many of whom are offered years of protection before being deported as soon as they turn 18.

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Source: Independent

Asylum Seekers in hunger strike at immigration centre

Failed asylum seekers at a Lincolnshire immigration centre say they have begun a hunger strike.

Police said they were monitoring the situation at the former women’s prison, Morton Hall near Lincoln.

The UK Border Agency said a sit-down protest, involving around 18 Afghan nationals, started at about 09:00 BST.

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Source: BBC News

Refugees turn to us in their desperation

RE: the couple from Cameroon, seeking asylum in the UK, who were due to be deported face familiar issues. I volunteer for Eagle’s Wing, a group of people, asylum seekers and refugees, who meet regularly at The Mosses Community Centre in Bury.

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Source: The Guide

Human rights: the assault continues

By Frances Webber| Institute of Race Relations

The government is poised to cut down the reach of human rights law, paving the way for easier deportation of foreign national prisoners.

The government’s announcements in the wake of the riots that non-British citizens convicted of riot-related offences will be deported ‘at the earliest opportunity’[1] is part of a new attempt to strip foreign national prisoners of the minimal protection against double punishment afforded them by international human rights law. And already, moves are in progress among foreign ministers of the forty-seven signatory states to the Human Rights Convention to shift power from the European Court of Human Rights to the states’ own domestic courts in matters of immigration and deportation. From November, the UK chairs the Council of Europe – and it will seek to use its chairmanship to push ahead with the reforms, which would allow the UK to adopt a much tougher line on the human rights criteria for deportation – without the oversight and corrective influence of the European Court.

Human rights court to lose powers?

The adoption of the Human Rights Convention in 1950 and the setting up of the European Court of Human Rights were arguably the greatest achievements of the Council of Europe. But justice secretary Ken Clarke has announced that he intends to use the UK’s chairmanship of the Council to ‘redraw the relationship with national courts’ and reduce the role of the European Court. And home secretary Theresa May is to argue for a ‘new definition’ of article 8 of the Convention, which protects the right to family and private life, which will ensure that foreign criminals cannot block their deportation.

The groundwork for such changes has already been laid, in proposals for reform to deal with the huge and growing backlog of cases to the Court. In April, a High Level Conference of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers met in Izmir, Turkey, following a meeting in Interlaken, Switzerland, which adopted streamlined screening procedures. The declaration adopted in Izmir went much further, leaving open the possibility of charging fees to those seeking to apply to the Court, and erecting further procedural obstacles, which drew strong opposition from hundreds of civil society groups and international NGOs, fearful that the changes would restrict access to the Court. An ominous feature of the Izmir declaration is the clause noting that the Court was not ‘an immigration appeals tribunal’ and should not intervene in asylum and immigration cases except in ‘the most exceptional circumstances’. This followed a speech by Clarke at the conference, in which he argued that domestic courts and parliaments should be given much more freedom to interpret and apply the Convention in their own way.

Double punishment

The idea that foreign national prisoners enjoy special rights and protections is laughable. But in the UK, the fact that deportation of foreign national prisoners is a double punishment which is frequently more severe and devastating than any prison sentence, has been obscured in the right-wing and tabloid clamour against their ‘human rights’, which has already led to legal changes in the past five years which make it more difficult to resist deportation,[2] and to greater willingness among judges to defer to Home Office assessments of the need for deportation in individual cases.[3] The hostility to the Human Rights Act and the campaign to dilute or abolish it, and to prevent foreign national prisoners relying on article 8 to prevent their deportation, rests on a number of misconceptions and misrepresentations.

As eminent lawyer Geoffrey Bindman recalled in an important recent defence of the Act,[4] the Convention is not some nasty foreign invention. Its key drafters were British, and Winston Churchill was a strong supporter. Opponents of the Act frequently cite the blocking of the deportation of Learco Chindamo (killer of headmaster Philip Lawrence) as an example of the ‘madness of human rights’. But what stopped the deportation of Chindamo, a young Italian national, was EU free movement law, which stipulates that only those EU nationals who present a serious current risk to public order or national security can be deported. It had nothing to do with human rights law.

And contrary to tabloid rants, article 8 gives no absolute guarantees against deportation. It merely requires decisions which separate families to be for the right reasons – such as preventing crime or disorder, or protection of the rights of others – and to be proportionate to those aims. This means that judges have to consider the effect of deportation on innocent family members, as well as the effect of not deporting on the public.

Proposal to sideline family life

But in July, Dominic Raab MP proposed an amendment to the UK law which would stop judges having the power even to consider such matters as family ties, or how long someone had lived in the UK. This would mean that someone with thirty years’ residence, with children and grandchildren born here, could be deported for, say, an offence of theft or assault, on top of serving a prison sentence, with no regard at all to the effect on the family or the likelihood of reoffending. At present, such an amendment would be incompatible with the Human Rights Convention and with the European Court’s case law – which is why the government is arguing in Europe for the right to interpret the Convention in its own way, without interference by the Court.

Protection against torture under threat?

Even more worrying is the government’s repeated argument to the Court that it should be able to deport terrorist suspects even where there is a real risk of torture. Thanks to the recent revelations about British involvement in extraordinary rendition to Libya,[5] we know that this happens anyway, under the cloak of secrecy. But for several years, the government has sought to make the process legal by getting the European Court to endorse the return of those it considers really serious threats to national security. The Court has always said no: the ban on sending people back to torture is absolute. But the Court might lose the power to intervene in deportations to torture, if the government’s attempts to reduce its jurisdiction in favour of national courts and parliaments bear fruit.

Any attempt to restrict the jurisdiction of the Court would need the approval of the Council’s Parliamentary Assembly and would have to be drafted as a Protocol. But many member states’ ministers support the British attempt to dilute the Court’s jurisdiction.[6] There is real concern that, in the absence of a strong and European-wide campaign, the diminishing protection against violation of migrants’ human rights will be reduced to vanishing point.

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FOOTNOTE

References: [1] ‘England riots: foreign rioters will be deported’, the Telegraph, 19 August 2011. [2] Changes in the immigration rules and the provisions for automatic deportation in the UK Borders Act 2007. [3] See ‘Foreign criminals, the press and the judges’ (http://www.irr.org.uk/2011/june/bj000025.html), IRR News, 29 June 2011. [4] ‘Britain should be proud of the Human Rights Act – and protect it’ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/human-rights-act-protect), Guardian, 30 August 2011. [5], ‘Libya: ministers “agreed to rendition”‘ (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8743340/Libya-ministers-agreed-to-rendition.html), Telegraph, 5 September 2011. [6] See ‘Accelerated removals: the human cost of EU deportation policies, 2009-10′, European Race Audit Briefing Paper No 4, download it here (http://www.irr.org.uk/pdf2/ERA_BriefingPaper4.pdf) (pdf file, 1.3mb). See also ‘Swiss campaign against double punishment’ (http://www.irr.org.uk/2011/july/bj000019.html), IRR News, 21 July 2011, for an account of the Swiss deportation proposals.

HAT news is precluded from expressing a corporate view: any opinions expressed are therefore those of the authors.

Deportation reconstruction as aid to action

By Dasom Lee| Institute of Race Relations

An overseas student reviews an unflinching film by augenauf, a Swiss human rights organisation, re-enacting a deportation.

To my mind, many of those who support anti-racism, multiculturalism, asylum seekers and refugees speak from an easy, privileged, white, middle-class position. Hence, it is often pity that they feel towards BME communities and asylum seekers rather than a sense of the need for complete equality. Such a patronising attitude is surprisingly common especially when artists discuss the themes of asylum seekers and refugees. More often than not these ‘victims’ are not portrayed as actors in their own right determining their fate but people to be looked after by those who know better. They are infantilised.

The film reconstruction of the deportation process in Switzerland produced by augenauf (http://www.augenauf.ch/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=127&Itemid=30 ), which is available on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16He1I274Xk ), successfully provides the emotional distance necessary for the viewer to grasp the reality. Clips are not shadowed by or overrun with sorrowful music or tears of detainees but show what happens in the process of deportation in a blunt and direct manner. Detainees are treated as objects that need to be removed, and cuffing, putting on a helmet seems rather benevolent compared to the trussing up of people with countless plastic ties to a rolling chair – the type used in warehouses to move heavy goods. There is a lack of communication between the detainee and the officers who are handling him. This is rare as many visual pieces on asylum tend to show the use of violent and racist languages towards detainees. The silence works well, nevertheless, as it shows a clear structure of power and encourages us to think about the possible solutions regarding the violation of human rights rather than leaving us feeling helpless just reaching for a box of tissues.

In one scene, detainees are referred to by number, a common method used to dehumanise. This method was used in systems of slavery and indentured labour and now in Guantañamo as a lingering reminder of colonisation. However, it is not just detention centres that reproduce colonial discourse, it is also there in western attitudes towards asylum seekers – the feeling of superiority while ‘helping’ someone from an ‘unfortunate country’. This film avoids personal judgements and helps us to understand the process of deportation which leaves us with a clear mind. After watching the film, I was not blinded by emotion but wanted to actively do something to create a more equal society where no human is treated in such a way ever again.

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FOOTNOTE

‘Reconstruction of a forced deportation carried out by the Swiss authorities’ by augenauf (http://www.augenauf.ch/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=127&Itemid=30 ) can be watched here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16He1I274Xk ).

HAT News is precluded from expressing a corporate view: any opinions expressed are therefore those of the authors.

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