• Home /
• News /
• 2013 /
• September /
• Collective expulsion: The case against Britain’s mass deportation charter flights, Corporate Watch, September 2013, pp.46 (ISBN 978-1-907738-12-8)

Collective expulsion: The case against Britain’s mass deportation charter flights, Corporate Watch, September 2013, pp.46 (ISBN 978-1-907738-12-8)

01 September 2013

A damning indictment of the British government’s mass deportation charter flights, which examines the history and development of the system of charter flights; the ways in which the government attempts to justify them (and why those justifications, for example on grounds of cost, do not stand up); the legality of mass deportation flights; and practices such as overbooking and the use of reserves and the role and activities of deportation doctors and monitors.

The authors make use of official figures (combined from disparate reports) to produce their own statistics that debunk arguments made by the government that there is a correlation between asylum applications from a particular country, and mass deportations to that same country. Similar claims about cost-effectiveness and a need to deport high numbers of foreign national prisoners are also disproved.

A section on the lawfulness of the UK’s mass deportation flights makes clear that the UK’s mass deportations may be unlawful were it not for the fact that the UK has not ratified Protocol 4 to the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits collective expulsion.

Overall the report provides a comprehensive critical analysis that refutes the arguments made by the UK government in favour of mass deportation flights. Its only major shortcoming is that the corporations involved are given far less attention than the state and its agencies. Available on the Corporate Watch website.