UK: Detention damned
01 May 1995
A damning Amnesty International report on the detention of asylum-seekers in Britain discloses that the Home Office routinely breaches international human rights standards, as well as its own guidelines. Despite Home Office assurances that detention is a last resort, the report shows, with reference to fifty case studies drawn at random from the detained asylum-seeking population (which stands at around 600 at any given time), that it is often a first resort, used apparently arbitrarily and irrationally, and without adequate legal remedies.
To the claim that those detained will be patently bogus applicants, Amnesty replies that in its sample of 50, seven were granted asylum at the end of the process, either by the Home Office (four) or on appeal (three): 14% compared with just over 3% of all asylum-seekers. Detained asylum-seekers were therefore more, not less likely to be genuine refugees than those not detained. Those granted asylum had spent over four months in detention before their claims were recognised. One was the only asylum-seeker at Edinburgh prison for over 500 days. One, with medical evidence of torture in Algeria, spent 241 days at Wandsworth prison. Of those at liberty during the processing of their claim (98% of all asylum-seekers), only 0.59% absconded.
Broken promises
Despite Home Office promises to get asylum-seekers out of prisons, in April 1995 they were in Winson Green, Brixton, Manchester, Wandsworth, Greenock, Bristol, Exeter, Armley, Belmarsh, Risley, Wormwood Scrubs, Birmingham, Norwich and Strangeways prisons, in remand centres in the Wolds and Hindley, and at Brinsford young offenders' institution (YOI) as well as in police cells, ports and immigration detention centres. Asylum-seekers were transferred to prison as punishment for disciplinary offences, without representatives being informed. Often no reasons were given for detention, or non-specific reasons. The Home Office refuses to give written reasons for detention, saying it would be too expensive.
Applications for bail are not available automatically as of right, but only in specific circumstances. There is no presumption in favour of bail, and adjudicators usually require two sureties to stand guarantor for ?2,000 each, which for two-thirds of the sample effectively prevented bail applications, since they knew no-one and had no potential sureties. The remedy of habeas corpus is useless since it looks only at the legal power to detain (and the Home Office has almost unlimited power) and not at the merits of a decision to detain. The High Court will only consider bail as an adjunct to other relief, and then only if a detention decision is "manifestly unreasonable" (which, in a 1980s case, nine months detention was not).
Amnesty concludes that the government is in breach of the UN Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under any form of Detention or Imprisonment in respect of the lack of an effective remedy for detention, the lack of reasons, and the obstruction of access to legal representatives caused by "ghosting". Further condemnation of the practice of detaining asylum-seekers came from several quarters. In its report "Zairian asylum seekers in the UK: their experiences in two countries", the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture reiterated findings of an earlier report, "A betrayal of hope and trust", that the vast majority of those asylum-seekers seen by its doctors had visible evidence of torture, and condemned the practice of detention of torture victims. The Home Office commented that its port medical inspectors could not be expected to find evidence of torture in their examinations, which were conducted only to see if passengers had infectious diseases, and that asylum-seekers should produce their own medical evidence of torture. But, as the Medical Foundation knows, such evidence is rarely accepted by the Home Office, whose usual response is that the scars and injuries found coul