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.

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Source: Independent

Where detention is the norm

By Frances Webber

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.

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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.

No need to detain refugees and undocumented migrants

Detaining migrants is unnecessary because more humane and less costly non-custodial alternatives exist, according to the latest report from the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS).

Entitled From Deprivation to Liberty: Alternatives to detention in Belgium, Germany and the UK , the report, which was launched in the European Parliament, is based on in-depth interviews with 25 migrants participating in alternatives-to-detention programmes in the three countries.

The report says that although community-based measures are clearly a step in the right direction, unless they are accompanied by appropriate legal, social and other support, migrants can be forced into destitution.

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Source: Ekklesia

Asylum seekers ordered back to UK

The High Court has ruled that a family of asylum seekers from Sri Lanka, who were unlawfully detained and flown to Germany six years ago, must be brought back to the UK. Their treatment was described in court as a ‘moral outrage’.

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Source: Yorkshire Post

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.

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Source: Ekklesia

Haslar detention centre criticised

An inspection of Haslar detention centre has criticised staff for having a ‘dismissive’ attitude towards detainees who claim to have been tortured.

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Source: Portsmouth News

Campsfield House criticised

The detention centre Campsfield House has been criticised in an inspection report which stresses particular concerns about the standard of healthcare and education.

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Source: BBC News

Geo to take over from G4S at Dungavel

The Geo Group which runs Guantánamo Bay has won a £25 million contract to run Dungavel detention centre in Scotland and will take over from the current company, G4S, in September 2011.

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Source: Daily Record

Serco under the spotlight

Serco, which runs detention centres in the UK and Australia, has accused Australian detainees of self-harming in order to use it as a ‘bargaining tool’, the news comes as three people have died in the UK, two in Colnbrook run by Serco.

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Source: Corporate Watch

Deaths in detention centres

The news coverage over the weekend reporting on the very recent deaths of three men in detention centres is yet another reminder that the system is, in my view, truly abhorrent.

The Guardian reported that two men died from suspected heart attacks at Colnbrook near Heathrow airport.  One of the men is Muhammad Shukat, who was 47 years old and of Pakistani nationality.  He died on 2 July.  The article reports that there was some considerable delay between the time that Muhammad Shukat collapsed at 6am and when his roommate raised the alarm and the time when an ambulance was actually called at 7.20am.  A post-mortem found the provisional cause of death to be coronary heart disease.

The second man who died at Colnbrook has not yet been named, but he seems to have been relatively young at 35 years of age.  He was found dead in his cell at 10.30am on 31 July. The post-mortem found the cause of death to be a ruptured aorta and his death is being treated as unexplained.

The third man, also aged 35 years old, killed himself at the Campsfield House detention centre in Oxfordshire on 2 August.

As Emma Ginn from Medical Justice says in the Guardian article, this only highlights the already very high level of concern held in respect of the provision of healthcare in detention centres.  Whether that is in response to emergencies or in terms of longer term medical conditions.  She sets out that:

“Based on medical evidence from many hundreds of detainees, Medical Justice has documented the disturbingly inadequate healthcare provision that often vulnerable immigration detainees are subjected to in Colnbrook and other immigration removal centres… [this] combined with the perilous and frightening conditions of detention, is a lethal cocktail, a disaster waiting to happen.”

A smidgeon of comfort is to be found in the recent case-law on unlawful detention. Faced with such tragic events, I do have difficulty with describing the courts’ favourable rulings a success.  Nevertheless, the High Court ruled on Friday 5 August in S v SSHD [2011] EWHC 2120 (Admin) that the UKBA had unlawfully detained a man with serious mental illness between April and September 2010 and that the circumstances of his detention at Harmondsworth breached Article 3 ECHR, the right not to be subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment.

It was well documented in S’s case that, both from his time in prison and in a psychiatric hospital, that detention had caused deterioration in his psychiatric state, precipitating psychotic symptoms and incidents of serious self harm.  The medical reports that followed S from the hospital on 23 April 2010 specifically warned that detention would cause him to regress to a state that he would once again require hospital admission.  However in deciding to detain S, the UKBA, inexplicably, stated that there was “no evidence” that he was mentally ill. The High Court found that the failure at the outset to understand and appreciate the nature and degree of S’s mental illness and to apply its own published policy regarding the detention of those with serious mental conditions to the circumstances of S’s case was repeated by UKBA officials until his release on bail by the High Court on 29 September 2010.

It is believed to be the first time that a UK court has found detention at an immigration removal centre to have breached Article 3 and the case has been adjourned for the issue of relief and damages to be considered (see here for press release and here for the full judgment).

And talking of damages, the Court of Appeal found in OM, R (on the application of) v SSHD [2011] EWCA Civ 909 that though the detention of a mentally ill person was unlawful due to a failure by the Secretary of State to consult her own policy, she was not entitled to damages as she could have been lawfully detained if the policy had been applied.  By now that outcome will probably sound familiar to you and of course follows the Supreme Court judgment in Lumba (see here for previous FM post).

So I have to ask:  if ordering the UKBA to pay damages is not option, do we have to wait for more deaths and/or inhuman and degrading treatment before we truly get to the bottom of this ?

For more statistics compiled by Medical Justice see here.

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