End Child Detention Now

In response to the government’s announcement about changes to the immigration system in the UK [Thursday 16 December 2010]:

End Child Detention Now, the citizens’ campaign working to end the scandal of child detention by the UK immigration authorities, continues to call for an immediate end to child detention and wants confirmation that the “ensured return” procedure does not involve the detention of children under another name.

Esmé Madill, coordinator of End Child Detention Now said:

“The evidence of harm caused by detention is overwhelming and there can be no justification for continuing to lock up children. An immigration system which allows the children of asylum seekers to be detained in conditions which would never be accepted for any other children and young people makes a mockery of the principle that every child matters. Children seeking sanctuary in the UK are among the most vulnerable in our communities and yet they are afforded less protection than any other group of children and young people. If the mark of a civilised nation is how it treats the most vulnerable we can hardly claim to be civilised.”

Commenting on these new developments, Professor Sir Al Aynsley-Green, who, as England’s first Children’s Commissioner, published a series of shaming reports on the plight of asylum seeking children, said:

“I welcome the statement from the Deputy Prime Minister that detention will end. I am pleased that no child is being held in detention now, that none will be held over Christmas, and that the Family Wing at Yarls Wood Immigration Removal Centre is to close forthwith. The evidence of harm to children from detention is incontrovertible, and so what happens between now and May and the proposed process of final return still demand the closest of public scrutiny with ongoing rigorous monitoring of what is being done to children and families.”

“My work whilst Children’s Commissioner exposed poor practice and a failure to promote the best interests of children by the UKBA. Much still remains to be done to document what happens to children when they present at border points; in residential care when unaccompanied; the process of age determination and their outcomes if returned to their countries of origin. Children seeking refuge are children first and foremost and deserve the humanity and dignity that we would expect for children in our own families. Today’s statement is a helpful and courageous step forward.”

Additional notes:

PROF SIR AL AYNSLEY GREEN, an international expert on child health, was awarded the International Juvenile Justice Observatory’s ‘Justice Without Borders International Award’ last month in recognition of his outstanding achievements as the first Children’s Commissioner for England.

END CHILD DETENTION NOW with openDemocracy, has just published a dossier of five years of evidence that the Government has ignored in its pursuit of ‘tough on immigration’ detention policy.
Link: http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/LatestDossier.pdf

END CHILD DETENTION NOW press campaign online:
http://claresambrook.com/campaign-page/campaign-page.html

By Clare Sambrook, for openDemocracy’s ourKingdom site, ahead of the government’s  expected announcement about child detention. Republished under the Creative Commons Licence. The original article can be found here.

Maybe deputy prime minister Nick Clegg is poised to end for good the scandal of child detention by the immigration authorities in his pre-Christmas statement. Maybe not.

Perhaps they’re making Clegg the bagman for the latest load of Home Office trickery regarding a policy that for years has been characterised by both brutality and deceit. I hope not.

But this is a moment to gather together the shameful evidence of the last five years so that it will not be forgotten. The campaign End Child Detention Now has done this and is publishing here as an openDemocracy-Our Kingdom Dossier (or see bottom of this post).

For years, the UK government has knowingly harmed between 1,000 and 2,000 children of asylum-seekers a year, sending dawn hit squads to raid family homes, to search children in their beds and lock them up (sometimes for weeks and months) in places known to harm their mental and physical health. All in the name of ‘border control’, driven by a political desire to look tough on immigration — and executed in venal disregard of a startling truth that the UK Border Agency let slip in evidence to Parliament last year: absconding is not an issue.

The citizens’ campaign End Child Detention Now has gathered some of the compelling research that the Home Office has variously ignored, misrepresented and buried these past five years. The research provides irrefutable evidence of damage done to children by detention and by other harmful and state-sanctioned practices.

Some of this research also offered viable alternatives to detention that the government chose to ignore, preferring dangerous and punitive practices that helped politicians look tough at the expense of children’s health and sanity.

Some of the authors whose work is represented here — respected academics and hard-working physicians — have endured Home Office attempts to undermine their work and trash their professional reputation. The report includes a selection of the government’s countless routine denials and misrepresentations (there is insufficient time and space for them all).

End Child Detention Now calls upon the coalition government to break away from ideologically-driven asylum policy, break with Phil Woolas-style thinking at the Home Office and pursue a proper asylum policy based on evidence and embracing respect for human rights and human dignity. The immediate end of child detention is essential but it is only the first step of a long walk towards decency.

Our Kingdom Dossier II – Latest

By Linda Briskman, Professor of Human Rights Education at Curtin University in Australia. This piece was originally published on ABC’s The Drum site; and is reproduced with kind permission of the author and the publisher.

Here in England I read with deep concern that, as in Australia, the policy to end the detention of children in immigration facilities has been delayed until next year.

As we recently celebrated the anniversary of the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, it is hard to fathom why this practice cannot cease immediately in both countries. The moral issue is clear. Children and their families should not be detained. The delaying tactics in the United Kingdom are chillingly similarly to those in Australia. In recent months in the UK I have heard people recount the commonly-held belief that children are not held in immigration detention in Australia. The duping of the public seeps out from Australian borders while the containment of the borders from ‘threats’, including children, persists. If the UK is not to follow the pernicious path of Australia, let us look at the facts.

In 2005, after much agitation about the detention of children by members of his own backbench, prime minister John Howard’s conservative government quickly released children from immigration detention. Although a political rather than a humanitarian response, it was welcomed by asylum seeker advocates and health and mental health professionals who had long pointed out the harms being inflicted on detained children.

In 2008 the newly-elected Labor Government went further and introduced a set of so-called detention values, one of which was not to detain children in detention centres. But despite the attempts by the cunning wordsmiths, children were again detained and in increasing numbers. This time they were held in ‘detention facilities’ instead of ‘detention centres’.

Now there are around 900 children in immigration detention in Australia. I have visited children and their parents on remote and isolated Christmas Island in a site known as the Construction Camp. This camp, comprising squalid demountable buildings, was created for construction workers who erected the maximum-security detention centre on the island which houses single men. The children may not be in that detention prison, but to project the image that the Construction Camp is an alternative to a detention centre is a blatant distortion of the truth. Here children languish in conditions that stunt development and which arguably breach international conventions to which Australia is a signatory.

The Australian Human Rights Commission has expressed concerns about the claustrophobic nature of the facility, the lack of grass and open space, and the lack of recreation areas. Because of overcrowding on the island some families have now been dispersed including to a remote Western Australian town. In Leonora, children and their parents continue to be deprived of liberty, isolated from support and surrounded by community members who are hostile to their presence.

In October the Australian Government announced that children and families would be released from detention but it will be June 2011 before this happens for the ‘majority’ of children. At the same time Prime Minister Julia Gillard disturbingly announced that new detention facilities for families would be developed. In England changes will not occur before next March.

What are the lessons can we pass on to the UK from the Australian experience? The first is to closely examine the accumulation of evidence on the harm caused to children by immigration detention. The second is to ensure that not only are children kept out of detention of any type, but that they are also not separated from their families. The third is to ensure that measures to keep children out of detention are enshrined in legislation to guarantee that change does not occur at the whim of government in response to community hysteria. Fourth, power should not be given to bureaucrats to detain without the clear ability to legally challenge the basis for detention through an independent body like the courts. And finally, the changes should occur quickly in both countries and not be hijacked by grindingly-slow bureaucratic processes.

There is considerable expertise in both countries to put fair and just measures in place.

Both the Australian and British governments ostensibly hail the importance of the institution of the family for their own citizens but deny this to those deemed to be unworthy. We seemingly lack the capacity to walk in the shoes of those we denigrate and to imagine what it would be like if our children were locked away by a brutal system. The detention of children is a national crisis and while prime ministers are adept at pointing to human rights abuses abroad, they appear blinded to the violations occurring at home.

There is much that is wrong with immigration systems and detention is among the worst of the systemic failures. Denying the liberty of innocent people, including children, and then subjecting them to uncertainty and systemic brutality is a source of shame to those who care about human rights. Hope may arise once the cruel tenet of detaining children is removed and, when governments realise that their political worlds will not cave in, there can follow more robust dismantling of the building blocks of a system that discards and dispenses of those we call ‘the other’.

Our societies need to ask what future generations will make of what we have done, of the damage caused to both innocents and the nation through futile policies that are based on political expedience and populist sentiment, rather than formulated through our shared humanity.

Linda Briskman is Professor of Human Rights Education at Curtin University in Australia. She is currently on sabbatical leave in England where she is conducting comparative research.

A busy fortnight for End Child Detention Now began with a post by Simon Parker on 16 November in OpenDemocracy – On Her Majesty’s Deceitful Service: The Woolas Case and the Ignoble Lies of the British State.

This was followed by a letter in reply to MP Tom Brake’s defence of the Lib Dem’s role in ‘ending child detention’ – without actually ending it in The Guardian on 18 November.

The Media Show on Wednesday 24 November featured an interview with Clare Sambrook on the ECDN media campaign and winning the Foot and Bevins prizes for investigative journalism. Clare also published a long feature on the history of the End Child Detention Campaign, Children seek the final exit from house of nightmares, in today’s Times (Saturday 27 November) [requires subscription].

At a ceremony in London this evening (Tuesday 9 November) Clare Sambrook was awarded the Bevins Prize for Investigative Journalism and collected its Rat Up a Drainpipe trophy for 2010, for her reports on the website openDemocracy and its UK section, OurKingdom.

Last week she won the 2010 Paul Foot Award and its £5,000 prize. This is the first time a web journalist has won either award.

See Clare’s latest article published on Monday this week here.

For a list of her openDemocracy coverage see here.

Clare is part of the campaign to End Child Detention Now see here.

Read Anthony Barnett here on the originality of her journalistic method of ‘Investigative Comment’ and openDemocracy’s policy of openness.

Clare Sambrook said,

Anthony Bevins set a terrific example of journalism keeping a distance from power, finding his own stories with tenacity and a sense of mischief. I am stunned to find my name linked to his. This is especially welcome to the campaign at a time when the government has completely reneged on its commitment to end child detention.

Anthony Barnett, her editor on the UK section of openDemocracy, OurKingdom said,

Journalism is going to be improved by the best of the web, as shown by Clare’s brilliant writing and sharp and brave reporting. She shows that an outsider with a mind of her own, supported by a great team at ‘End Child Detention Now’ can produce really effective reporting of the highest standards, in a tradition that goes back to William Cobbett.

Oliver Luft, reporting on behalf of the Press Gazette described the presentation:

Presenting her with her prize at the ceremony, in London last night, award trustee Andrew Marr praised the “huge amount of reporterly work” conducted by Sambrook, who he said had straddled the online, printed and the broadcast worlds to “thrust her campaign as hard as she could up the nether regions of those in power”.

“We chose somebody who has operated through newspapers, online and has turned her journalism into a huge campaign,” he said.

“In this country, which is allegedly civilised, at this moment children of people who have come in completely as of right to seek asylum are incarcerated in a way that is utterly against all our best traditions.

“This was a cause that was championed by our winner, which effected the general election campaign… including eminently the Liberal Democrats whose leader denounced the practise and who now as deputy prime minister appears to have done very little about.”

The Bevins Prize is awarded in honour of Anthony Bevins, the leading political journalist who worked for a wide range of newspapers during his career: the Liverpool Post and Echo, the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Times, the Independent, the Observer and the Daily Express. Bevins often seemed to represent an almost one-man stand against what Nick Davies, the journalist and author who appears on this year’s shortlist, has called ‘churnalism’. Wherever he worked, Bevins researched rigorously, and regularly broke otherwise untouched – even ‘untouchable’ – stories. This award in his name aims to encourage and promote that relentless pursuit of truth. The Prize is a bronze statue of a ‘Rat up a Drainpipe’, Bevins’s favourite phrase, capturing the essence of his approach to journalism.

This year’s shortlist included David Cohen who wrote in the Evening Standard about the tragic fate of newborn babies buried four to a plot in paupers’ graves. Sean O’Neil and David Brown who investigated the child sex abuse scandal centred on the Benedictine Monastery and St Benedict’s school for The Times. Nick Davies who wrote extensively on the “dark arts” of phone tapping for the Guardian. Clare Sambrook for openDemocracy, the Guardian and New Londoners on the detention of children in the immigration system. Finally, Jerome Starkey reported on the uncovering of botched action in Afghanistan for The Times.

The judges were: Shami Chakrabarti, Director, Liberty
Colin Hughes, Director, Business and Professional, Guardian News and Media
Paul Lewis, Journalist, The Guardian, 2009 Bevins Prize winner
Ken Livingstone, Former Mayor of London
Andrew Marr, Journalist and Broadcaster
Heather Brooke, Writer, Journalist & Activist

Clare Sambrook, novelist and journalist, has won the 2010 Paul Foot Award for her writing and reporting in support of the campaign to end child immigration detention. Thanking the judges for this ‘massive honour’, Clare told the audience at the Guardian/Private Eye ceremony at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in London this evening that “reading Paul Foot’s books when I was fresh out of university gave me a strong sense of what journalism could and should be.

“This is a massive honour, hugely encouraging and a real boost to the End Child Detention Now campaign at a time when the government has reneged on its commitment to stop this inhumanity.’

Clare’s journalism is rooted in End Child Detention Now, a citizens’ campaign to end the scandal of child detention by the UK immigration authorities — formed in July 2009 by six friends. End Child Detention Now members working unpaid and unfunded: persuaded 121 MPs to sign a parliamentary motion calling for the end of child detention; held vigils and demonstrations in London, York and Dagenham; support families in detention and on their release; addressed the Church of England Synod Public Affairs Council; collaborate with campaign groups including Shpresa, Refugee & Migrant Justice, SOAS Detainee Support, Women for Refugee Women, Yarl’s Wood Befrienders, Welsh Refugee Council, Positive Action in Housing; coordinated a series of public letters in the national press from church leaders, novelists, children’s writers, actors & directors; prompted questions in the Commons, the Lords and the Scottish Parliament and in six months raised nearly 5000 signatures on a national online petition.

Commenting on the rising ECDN campaign towards Christmas 2009, Dr Frank Arnold, clinical director of Medical Justice and an expert in torture scars said:

‘Over many years numerous groups and individuals have attempted to combat the horrible practice of detaining children, families, torture survivors and others who have sought refuge in the UK from brutality in their homelands. The process and the justifications for detention have become ever more illogical and baroque. For the first time, we are beginning to see a truly powerful groundswell against it.’

• ECDN Press campaign

• ECDN Campaign

The New Statesman reports on a BBC investigation that government pilots involving 113 families in London and the North-West had given families with children just two weeks to voluntarily leave the country. Two families who refused to comply were taken into detention and deported shortly after and two families accepted voluntary re-settlement packages. Significantly only 3 of the 113 families involved in the pilot ceased contact with the authorities or disappeared – emphasising the extremely low probability of such families absconding.

As Samira Shackle writes, the real problem is that as a consequence of cuts to legal aid and the closure of specialist providers of legal support to refugees and asylum seekers, ‘the vast majority of people seeking asylum are not given anything resembling a fair hearing’. That appears to be of no concern to the Home Office as it prepares new tough compliance controls involving separately detaining one or other parent in order to force the family onto a flight, electronic tagging, and ‘non-detained’ accommodation new Heathrow Airport from which one assumes it will be difficult to escape.

What the BBC report fails to point out, however, is that following the coalition government’s announcement that ‘the moral outrage’ of child detention was to end, 37 children have been held in immigration detention between 1st June and 4th October according to the UKBA’s own figures.

It would appear that only the Deputy Prime Minister finds the continued incarceration of children by his Home Office colleagues disturbing. With the talk of  ‘ending child detention’ shifting to Damian Green’s increasing reference to ‘minimizing detention’ – a practice the Home Secretary staunchly defended in the High Court only a week ago -  it is not surprising to hear Dame Pauline Neville-Jones say that ‘I trust that we will not be in a situation in which children are detained for any length of period at all; but certainly if they were, education would be a very important factor’. In other words, we may well need to keep open Yarl’s Wood.

So much for the Deputy Prime Minister’s promise to end child detention for good. The UKBA are trying to soften up the Clegg/Huhn wing of the government for a predictable ‘there is no alternative to detention’ conclusion to yet another flawed pilot. This  ill-thought out scheme has everything to do with ramping up the removal figures and nothing to do with allowing parents and children a fair hearing from a genuinely impartial justice system. It is good to hear the Children’s Society voicing its opposition to this despicable attack on vulnerable children and their families. We now need to see all the charities and NGOs who were persuaded to join the government’s flawed and cynical review to follow suit and publicly distance themselves from its punitive and dangerous consequences.

The Today report can be heard on BBC iplayer [about 50 minutes in].

On Tuesday 26 October, a judicial review challenge to the Government’s family detention policy reaches the High Court in London. The Claimants – two single mothers and their young children – are seeking an order declaring the Government’s family detention policy unlawful. In May 2010, the Coalition Government announced that it would end the detention of children for immigration purposes, a practice that the Deputy Prime Minister described as “a moral outrage”.

Five months on, children continue to be held at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre for indeterminate periods in prison-like conditions, the Government’s plans having stalled and been watered down. Last February, Reetha Suppiah, Sakinat Bello and their children were arrested by UK Border Agency officers in dawn raids. They and their children were loaded into vans with caged windows and driven to Yarl’s Wood in a state of confusion and distress. Reetha and her two boys (aged 1 and 11) were detained for 17 days, whilst Sakinat and her two year-old daughter were held for 12 days before being released back into the community. Both families had been reporting regularly to the immigration authorities prior to their arrest. Upon arrival at Yarl’s Wood, all of the children became sick, suffering from diarrhoea and vomiting.

It appears that the welfare needs of the families were not properly taken into account or even assessed prior to the decision to detain, and the detention experience has had a profound effect upon them. Reetha’s eldest child was particularly badly affected and recalls seeing “policemen everywhere” in Yarl’s Wood. Since his release, he has lived in continuous fear of re-arrest. The families claim that their detention was unlawful and that it subjected them to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. They also allege breaches of the children’s rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Jim Duffy of Public Interest Lawyers said today: “Our clients’ experiences and the broad expert consensus point to a practice that is inhumane, destructive and unnecessary. Child detention has to end now.” The claim will be heard over three days from 26th until 28th October.

For further information please contact Public Interest Lawyers on 07912 691 727.

End Child Detention Now is thrilled to announce that our pro-bono co-ordinator, Clare Sambrook, has been shortlisted for the Paul Foot Award 2010.

Clare’s work has been published by numerous media organisations, and can be viewed at this link. The  annual award, set up by Private Eye and the Guardian in memory of the  journalist Paul Foot, celebrates the very best of campaigning journalism and this year’s winners will be announced on 2nd November.

Clare has also been shortlisted for another investigative journalism award, the Bevins Prize -  the final winner will be announced in London on 9th November.

An extract from the Guardian’s report on the Paul Foot shortlist:

This year’s shortlist speaks for itself. Paul Foot would have approved. The six entries expose MPs seeking cash for influence (“I’m like a cab for hire”, Stephen Byers); the continuing existence of paupers’ graves in London; phone-hacking by the News of the World when Andy Coulson, now the government’s director of communications, was editor; the coverup of the British army’s actions on Bloody Sunday; the scandal of the detention of asylum seekers’ children; and show that DNA tests are not always accurate.

The shortlisted journalists are, in alphabetical order: Jonathan Calvert and Clare Newell, the Sunday Times; David Cohen, the Evening Standard; Nick Davies, the Guardian; Linda Geddes, the New Scientist; Eamonn McCann, the Irish Times, the Belfast Newsletter and the Guardian; Clare Sambrook, openDemocracy, the Observer, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, the Guardian Community Care, Big Issue in the North, Morning Star, Counterfire, Nursery World, Private Eye, Manchester Mule, Baptist Times, Cumberland Herald, Cumberland News, Quaker Asylum & Refugee Network, Independent Catholic News, New Londoners, Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants Bulletin, and on other campaigning blogs.