Let’s make the end of child detention herald a humane and evidence-based approach to asylum

Summer 2010 JCWI Bulletin

Clare Sambrook and Esmé Madill, coordinators of End Child Detention Now, on the crucial next stage of the campaign.

When the new government said, ‘We will end the detention of children for immigration purposes,’ some people proclaimed victory. But, as the families locked up in Yarl’s Wood pointed out in a letter published in the Observer, ‘we are still here in the detention centre’.

read on here

Despair, hope and despair again: the rollercoaster ride towards ending child detention

17 June 2010 The New Londoners

The new government’s promise to ‘end the detention of children for immigration purposes’, sparked hopes that this country might at last be moving towards an asylum policy based on evidence and not led by politicians’ terror of the tabloids.

Having acknowledged that child detention was wrong, the government’s logical next step would be to release the families currently being held and call off the hit-squads whose work is arresting and detaining families in conditions known to harm their mental health.

But the government has not released the families. The dawn raids carry on regardless.

read on here or here

Homer’s oddity

9 to 20 July 2010 private eye (issue 1266)

Amid mounting political concern about child detention just before the General Election, UKBA granted private contractors Serco a contract to carry on running Yarl’s Wood for the next three years, costing the tax-payer £900,000 every month.

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Child’s prey

23 June 2010 private eye

Last year, after a serious incident of child sex abuse at Yarl’s Wood, UKBA singularly failed to investigate the incident or provide adequate care for the children involved.

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When they said ‘We will end child detention,’ they meant ‘Keep on arresting babies’

19 May 2010, open democracy

At 11.36 this morning the mother of an 8-month old baby made a desperate plea for help on her mobile.

‘I told them please don’t send me and my baby in the van for nine hours, she is too young, I asked them to speak to my lawyer. But she just told me, “Look either you go in the van or we will take your baby in a separate van and you won’t see her until you get to Yarl’s Wood.”’

read on at open democracy. . .

Samaranch, Kissinger and the Coca Cola company:
a relentless fascist’s curious date with democracy

The day Juan Antonio Samaranch, the leader of the 'Olympic Movement' who died last month, faced allegations of corruption at a US Congressional hearing.

15 May 2010, open democracy

I happened to be there on Capitol Hill one bright December morning when Juan Antonio Samaranch, who last month died of heart failure, aged 89, had his first and only encounter with democratic scrutiny

It was 1999. The leader of the ‘Olympic Movement’ had spent the year manoeuvring to save his skin — and the Olympic myth — from financial catastrophe threatened by a well-earned corruption scandal. He had been summoned under threat of subpoena to testify before the Commerce Subcommittee, whose mission was to ‘go after fraud and abuse wherever we find it’.

Waiting in line before the hearing, I caught sight of Samaranch, standing apart, cut off from his entourage, small, old and apprehensive. I felt sorry for him . . . almost.

read on at open democracy

Scare centres

14 to 27 May 2010 private eye (issue 1262)

‘We recognise that when your child arrives at one of our centres they may be bewildered, tired and worried,’ security giant G4S tells families of young people locked up at its secure training centres. Children may be rightly worried.

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Bucks for Berks

14 to 27 May 2010 private eye (issue 1262)

Could the decision to pay extraordinary rewards for ordinary performance be anything to do with the trust’s remuneration committee, some of whom are clearly out of touch?

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Let’s ensure they really do end child detention now

If the government means the immediate closure of Yarl's Wood, that should be a cause for great rejoicing. We must hold them to it

12 May 2010, open democracy

‘We will end the detention of children for immigration purposes,’ says today’s coalition agreement. A stunning victory for children, decency and the Liberal Democrats if this pledge proves good. That may be a very big if.
Days before the Election David Cameron offered to set up a ‘working party’ including charities to ‘review child detention’. What’s to review? NHS paediatricians and psychologists Lorek et al six months ago found that children at Yarl’s Wood were ‘clearly vulnerable, marginalized, and at risk of mental and physical harm as a result of state sanctioned neglect (inadequate care and protection), and possibly abuse in the sense of exposure to violence within the detention facilities themselves.’

read on at open democracy. . .

Gordon Brown: the child detention letters

4 May 2010, open democracy

Following Brown's speech to Citizens UK today, there was a remarkable moment during which the Prime Minister, attempting to leave the stage, was challenged by the assembled citizens on whether he would put an end to the government's detention of children in immigration centres like Yarl's Wood. After a failed attempt to deflect the question, he said he 'wanted no child to suffer' and promised to look at the issue - an answer that left many who were there unsatisfied. Cameron too said he would review the practice, and only Clegg promised to end it. OurKingdom publishes an exchange on child detention between Gordon Brown and Clare Sambrook, journalist and Open Democracy author who campaigns with End Child Detention Now.

read on at open democracy

Crime pays

30 April to 13 May 2010 private eye (issue 1261)

G4S Nick Buckles pockets £1,656,251, on top of a £6million pension pot, on top of a £115,000 divi payment on his £4 million stack of shares, as detainee Eliud Nguli Nyense dies at Oakington Detention Centre.

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Election time: asylum seekers lose their last safety net

26 April 2010, open democracy

When terrified men, women and children are being shunted off to countries where they face real and imminent risk of rape, torture, genital mutilation or death, an MP’s urgent appeal to government may tip the balance, stalling removal directions, making time to get legal advice.

But not during a general election campaign, when MPs lose their right to represent constituents' grievances. ‘We will not be able to respond to former MPs, or prospective parliamentary candidates on individual cases,’ says the UK Border Agency, ‘unless there is a signed letter of authority from the individual they are representing.’

For an asylum seeker banged up unexpectedly in a detention centre, isolated from help and support, with little English, no legal advice, restricted access to a fax machine, and facing a dawn deportation flight, the effect until May 6th is likely to be: no representation.

read on at open democracy

Surveillance + detention = £Billions: How Labour’s friends are ‘securing your world’

13 April 2010, open democracy

At the bustling Counter Terror Expo in London’s Olympia this week they are giving top billing to the security industry’s favourite politician. ‘The most experienced cabinet minister of modern times’, they call him: Dr John Reid.

Home office colleagues say Reid — Labour hard man, former secretary of state for health and defence, and home secretary — is the minister who brought business in from the cold. These days relations are warm and cosy. Marketing their wares as vital to the war on terror, while dreaming up everyday applications for intrusive high security kit, Reid’s friends have quietly advanced deep into the public sector — running schools, GP clinics and police investigations.

read on at open democracy

Pulling the Woolas

2 April to 15 April 2010 private eye (issue 1259)

Is minister Phil Woolas —  the MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth (majority 4,225) —  lying about child detention in order to appease the 5,435 Oldham residents  who voted BNP in last year’s Euro Elections?

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‘All the detainees are treated with dignity and respect’

18 March to 1 April 2010 private eye (issue 1258)

Rima Andmariam, aged 16, woken by Yarl’s Wood staff and told to dress for deportation the morning after her removal had been halted.

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Has Meg Hillier gone mad?

19 march 2010, open democracy

Home Office minister Meg Hillier took a leap into la la land on today’s BBC Daily Politics Programme, claiming that if the government stopped locking up asylum seekers and their children, then the price of trafficked children would rise, putting more children at risk of trafficking.

I am not making this up.

Hillier, who has three young children of her own, said: ‘Now with children being detained I’m faced with a number of options. One is that we just stop it altogether, but then we would have children, I think, with a very high price on them, because we’d actually be saying, if you have a child you will never be detained to be deported. And I think that it would raise the risk of child trafficking and put a very high price on a child, so I’d be very reluctant to go down that route.’

It’s not as if Hillier blurted out this nonsense live and inadvertently.

read more at open democracy. . .

Take one traumatised child, classify as 'adult', arrest, lock up, and bundle onto plane, bound for danger - Labour's Britain in 2010

8 march 2010, open democracy

‘He looks my age,’ says my nine-year-old son. ‘He looks sort of like me.’ There’s a picture on my screen: a small, slight boy who, for legal reasons, we’ll call M. He’s being cuddled by his 17 year old big brother Z. Both boys are smiling. They have been reunited after a long, hard separation.

Back home in war-torn Afghanistan their parents and a sister were killed. Big brother Z was first to come to Britain, traumatised, in November 2008. He has refugee status, studies for his GCSEs at school in Leicester.

This past October little brother M made his way here. Despite M’s size, his vulnerability, his boyish looks, officials said, you’re not 14, you’re an adult.

read on at open democracy. . .

Jolly happy children at Yarl’s Wood

Government lies about the suffering of children in detention

18 february 2010, guardian

Uniformed men break down your door, burst in, shout at your children, Get up! Get Up! You may pack a few belongings. Your boy needs a wee. The woman in uniform watches over him in case of . . . what?

Your children are in danger and there is nothing, absolutely nothing you can do to protect them.

Sir Al Aynsley-Green’s new report on children banged up at Yarl’s Wood has survived Government attempts to neuter it — but only just.

read on at guardian. . .

Ed Balls and his iron hat

The Children, Schools and Families Bill is a stealth attack on liberty

26 january 2010, open democracy

My children, educated at home under their own direction, see themselves in Tom, the Russell Hoban character who likes to fool around with sticks and stones and crumpled bits of paper, bent nails, glass and holes in fences.

Tom’s maiden aunt, Miss Fidget Wonkham-Strong, who wears an iron hat, believes that too much playing is bad for him, he had better stop it and do something useful, learn off pages from the Nautical Almanac, eat his cabbage-and-potato sog.

The minister, Ed Balls, would suit an iron hat.

read on at open democracy. . .

Roll calls, body searches and sex games

What Parliament isn’t being told about children’s lives inside a UK detention centre

17 january 2010, open democracy

Back in October, a study by NHS paediatricians and psychologists, Lorek et al, found that babies and children were being harmed at Yarl’s Wood detention centre.

The doctors recorded children’s 'increased fear due to being suddenly placed in a facility resembling a prison', their weight loss and tummy pains, how older children were so stressed they wet their beds and soiled their pants.

The study related the photographing and the fingerprinting, the roll calls and the body searches, the ID cards that children must carry at all times, the ten locked doors between freedom and the family centre, the steep deterioration in parents' mental health and parenting abilities, the self-harm and the suicide attempts.

And the sex games.

read on at open democracy. . .

Serco Clowns

10 december 2009, private eye

Serco and the Home Office threw a party to open the new school for innocent children forcibly detained at Yarl’s Wood.

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Child detention: cui bono?

Who profits from locking up asylum-seeking families

tuesday 24 november 2009, end child detention now

There is no evidence that asylum-seekers with children are likely to abscond, yet the government forcibly detains at least 2000 children and babies every year and holds them, sometimes for months on end, in conditions known to damage their physical and mental health.

Why on earth would our government do that?

One principle that has guided investigations since Roman times is: Cui Bono? Who benefits?

Business is booming at G4S, the company that runs Tinsley House Removal Centre where last month ten-year-old Adeoti Ogunsola, after being forcibly redetained, tried to strangle herself.

read on at end child detention now. . .

Henry Porter reported on this piece at guardian.co.uk

Detention of asylum seeking children is abuse

4 november 2009, community care

One key feature of government guidance issued this week on how UK Border Agency staff should care for the children they lock up, is  ‘safer recruitment’.

Officers raiding family homes and searching children in their beds will be thoroughly checked, with ‘references always taken up’.

That begs the question: just how low were standards until now?

read on at community care. . .

Labour's to blame for the BNP

Peter Hain's call to fight the far-right party is right, but he and his chums have paved its way

monday 4 may 2009, guardian

Along with many readers who have responded to Peter Hain's article on tackling the BNP, I blame its rise on him and his discredited government.

read on at guardian. . .