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France: Double punishment

01 November 1992

An Algerian national started his second hunger strike on 1 September in an attempt to stop his threatened deportation after serving a sentence for dealing in 500gm of cannabis. M Deradidj was on hunger strike with 20 others earlier in the year. He called it off after 40 days, when the Interior Ministry agreed to reconsider his case. He has now been told his deportation is to go ahead.

Double punishment - a prison sentence and deportation for the same offence - has been a campaigning issue for some years in France, and there have been a number of successful cases brought to the European Court of Human Rights, against the deportation of north Africans who have spent most of their life in France.

Migration Newssheet, October 1992

UK: Double punishment

The Campaign against Double Punishment has recently published the report of its first national conference, held in February 1992. In 1990/91, it reports, 415 people were recommended for deportation by the courts, and another 317 people were told by the Home Office that they were to be deported under the conducive to the public good provisions of the 1971 Immigration Act. Prisoners facing deportation do not get home leave, and are often denied parole or are detained for deportation as soon as parole is granted.

The report draws attention to the particular problems of women prisoners, who often have to part with infant children because of shortage of mother and baby units in prisons. Drug "mules", usually poor African or Latin American women recruited for very little money, get consistently higher sentences than their British counterparts, largely because of the lack of social enquiry reports into their home circumstances and lack of interest on the part of their legal representatives and the court.

No immigration laws: no double punishment, Campaign Against Double Punishment, The Old Library, Cheetham Hill Road, Manchester M8 7SN, tel: 061-740 8600, price £3.00.