Barbed Wire Europe
01 June 2000
This past year has seen a growth in resistance to the EU's increasing use of immigration detention, through hunger-strikes and riots by imprisoned refugees and migrants, demonstrations by activists and criticism by civil liberties groups. Oxford campaigners from the Close Down Campsfield Campaign have now taken up the issue of immigration detention and want to see this practice abolished in the EU. They are organising a pan-European conference this September to coordinate future strategies of resistance and put the issue of detention on the agenda of MP's and MEP's.
The demand for the abolition of immigration detention comes at a time when EU ministers are planning an immense increase in detention centres and deportations. In the UK, over 1,000 refugees and migrants are detained under Immigration Act powers at any given time and in the first four months of the year, over 15,000 people have been deported from the UK. The UK Home Secretary, Jack Straw, and Ireland's Minister for Justice, John O'Donoghue, have announced plans to further increase the number of deportations.
Ian Boon, UK Immigration Service director of enforcement, told a public meeting in June that deportations are to be increased from 9,000 in 1999 to 12,000 in 2000 and eventually to 57,000 a year. The UK government is planning to increase the number of asylum-seekers held in detention centres from the current 900 places to 2,700 over the next year. Detention centres are planned to be built at Thurleigh, Bedfordshire and Manston near Thanet, Kent.
Oakington, a new detention centre which has opened in March this year near Cambridge, is located in a former military barracks and is being used to fast-track asylum-seekers whose applications are suspected to be "manifestly unfounded" by immigration officers upon arrival. Asylum rights campaigners have strongly criticised this procedure, under which asylum-seekers are sent straight from the airport to the detention centre. Oakington is the first detention centre to hold families and has a capacity for about 400 people.
Another former prison complex in the town of Aldington will also be used to house asylum-seekers. When asked in the House of Lords why the government considered a former prison complex, Home Office Under-Secretary Lord Bassam of Brighton said that:
"the redevelopment of Aldington as an immigration detention centre providing 300 places is an excellent opportunity to make effective use of Crown land in a good location in proximity to major ports in the South East and to motorway systems. The development will allow the return to Prison Service use of the 198 beds currently occupied by detainees at Rochester prison."
It is precisely this preoccupation with facilitating the deportation procedure by imprisoning asylum-seekers near to air and sea ports, rather than concern for a fair asylum procedure, which is condemned by human rights and civil liberties
organisations.
In Ireland, the Human Rights Commission (HRC) and the Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference have criticised the fact that asylum-seekers whose claims are being processed are being held in prison conditions and treated like criminals. The HRC chief commissioner, Brice Dickson, said he wanted the practice of detaining asylum-seekers be made unlawful. After a visit to Magilligan prison in Derry, which is currently being used to "house" asylum-seekers and refugees, SDLP councillor Gerard Lynch said that "it is simply not good enough that people who have been convicted of no crime should be locked up in the way they are at present".
Another concern is the secrecy and unaccountability surrounding Europe's new "asylum-prison complex". The Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF) points out that detention centres such as Granja Agricola (Spanish enclave in North Africa) Steenokkerzeel (Brussels) and Via Corelli (Milan, shut down after massive protests) "are synonymous with repression and human rights abuse" and that "secrecy a