By Simon Parker In a report released today the Home Affairs Select Committee expressed a number of concerns about the detention of children in the UK immigration system but failed to acknowledge that the detention of children for any length of time is abusive and harmful to their well being. In the first part of [...]
By Clare Sambrook THERE is no evidence that asylum-seekers with children are likely to abscond, yet the Government forcibly detains at least 2,000 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 [...]
Christian Today Posted: Friday, November 20, 2009, 13:51 (GMT) Methodist, Baptist and United Reformed Church leaders have called on people to send an extra card this Christmas, to Immigration Minister Phil Woolas MP, asking him to end the detention of children in the asylum system. The Rev David Gamble, President of the Methodist Conference, criticised [...]
By JO STEELE – Monday, November 16, 2009 www.metro.co.uk A boy of six who was born in Britain faces being sent to a war-ravaged part of Africa because his parents split up. Adrian Atkinson’s mother, Anna, has been ordered to go to the Congo Republic within the next nine days. The decision, based on Ms [...]
Welcoming news that Gordon Brown is to apologise for the UK’s role in sending thousands of its children to former colonies in the 20th century, SNP MSP for Central Scotland Christina McKelvie has repeated calls on the UK Government to end the 21st century detention of children in UK Border Agency immigration removal centres. The [...]
This has been a momentous week for the end child detention campaign with the No10 petition recording its 2,000th name – one for every child arrested and locked up by the UK Borders Agency just because they or their parents have dared to claim asylum and refused to be returned to countries the Home Office [...]
By Clare Sambrook, a co-ordinator of citizens’ campaign End Child Detention Now Community Care, November 4 2009. 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 [...]
SNP MP Pete Wishart questions Home Office figures on child detention and states that holding children in adult detention centres is “simply wrong”. The immigration minister Phil Woolas, in a letter to Mr Wishart (who has signed Chris Mullin’s EDM), also revealed that 889 children from 488 families had been detained for more than 28 [...]
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