Let’s be clear, nobody wants to see children detained. Certainly I don’t. But we do have an immigration system and we have rules. And when somebody doesn’t have legal right to stay in the country, we ask them to leave voluntarily, and if they don’t we have to have a way of getting them out of the country.

Now with children being detained I’m faced with a number of options.

One is that we just stop it altogether, uhm but then we would have children, I think, with a very high price on them, because we’d actually be saying say 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. - Meg Hillier, Home Office Minister with special responsibility for children in detention on the Daily Politics, 19 March 2010.

Leaving aside the fact that the Home Office routinely separates children from their parents and that the reason that many women are currently on hunger strike at Yarl’s Wood despite having committed no offence is because they have been forcibly separated from their children, Hillier’s comment was clearly intended to create the impression in the mind of the audience that either a) destitute single asylum seekers would place orders for small children to be trafficked half way across the world by criminal gangs with forged identity papers (and no doubt matching the false ‘parents’ DNA and blood group or b) they would somehow borrow or adopt children who had already been trafficked into the country (with neatly forged ID documents etc) for as Meg said a ‘high price’ the minute some empty headed government decided to follow the soft-hearted Swedes, Australians and Canadians in not locking up children in detention centres. Because these governments foolishly gave into the pro-children/pro-human rights lobby, as we all know there are containers full of trafficked children just waiting to be delivered to failed asylum seekers for large sums of money in Toronto, Sydney and Stockholm. Please, please, if Meg is too busy praising the care and compassion of those who administer Serco’s £85 million anti-child trafficking repatriation unit would somebody let Interpol know asap?

For more on the surreal world of ‘Mystic’ Meg and the trafficked children read ECDN coordinator Clare Sambrook’s blog on OpenDemocracy.

“..the handling of this case as a whole, both prior to and following the bringing of judicial review, fails in several respects to meet the requirements of both the public interest in an efficient immigration system and the protection of individual rights”.

- Judge David Elvin

A FAMILY of asylum seekers are in line to receive tens of thousands of pounds in damages after they were unlawfully detained for three weeks.

A High Court judge yesterday ruled that Fred Nukagem, and his wife and children, were held for too long prior to a planned deportation to Cameroon due to the “procedural ineptitude” of immigration authorities.

Negotiations are now underway over how much should be paid to Mr Nukagem.

And the legal team for the 38-year-old, from Middleport, is also hoping to reach an agreement over a compensation settlement for his wife and three children.

Solicitor Hani Zubeidi, of London-based Fadiga and Co, said: “We are looking at tens of thousands of pounds because, quite frankly, this is a shocking case.”

Mr Nukagem, who says he and his family will be killed for political reasons if they return to Cameroon, claimed asylum after initially arriving in the country in 2003 as a student and later working illegally.

But his application was turned down and immigration officers raided his home.

He and wife Sandra Mbelle Yanga, as well as three-year-old twins Grace and Josepha, and Julie Sandra, aged one, were taken to Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre on November 5, 2008.

They were due to be deported five days later, which would give authorities the chance to administer one to two days of a pre-dosage of anti-malarial drugs to the children.

But it later emerged the UK Border Agency had been given the wrong information about the drug, as Mefloquine requires three weeks of pre-dosage.

The family were released on bail on November 26.

During a High Court hearing in December, Mr Nukagem’s lawyers argued the period of detention was unlawful as the family had been locked up on a misunderstanding.

They said, even with the right information, the family would have been detained for too long.

The lawyers also said there was also no reasonable basis to think they would flee as the family had complied with conditions imposed as part of their asylum application.

Yesterday, Judge David Elvin told the court: “While this form of delay and procedural ineptitude is all too frequent in this area of the law, and may be understandable up to a point – although not necessarily excusable – it is a particular cause for concern and criticism in circumstances which involve the detention of young children.

“Indeed, the handling of this case as a whole, both prior to and following the bringing of judicial review, fails in several respects to meet the requirements of both the public interest in an efficient immigration system and the protection of individual rights.”

A judicial review over the family’s right to remain in the UK is ongoing.

Negotiations over damages should be complete within 56 days.

Mr Nukagem, of Port Street, said: “We cannot go back to Cameroon. If we do we will be murdered because of my links to political groups.

“I’m quite prepared to contribute to society. I have paid taxes and everything in the past, and I’ve never been in trouble with the police. I just want a better future for my family.”

Matthew Coats, head of immigration for the UK Border Agency said: “We are disappointed with the court’s judgment.

“These people had no legal right to be in this country and our aim was to remove them as quickly as possible.

“We will learn lessons from this case.

“We are committed to providing protection to those genuinely in need of it.”

Nick Clegg 15/12/09

Dear Gordon,

I am writing to urge you to stop the scandal of hundreds of very young children, including toddlers, spending this Christmas locked up behind bars in Immigration Centres in Britain.

One of the best ways to judge the moral compass of a nation is how we treat children – all children.
There is now concrete evidence that the very young children who find themselves locked up even though they’ve done nothing wrong are suffering weight loss, post traumatic stress disorder and long lasting mental distress.
How on earth can your Government justify what is in effect state sponsored cruelty?

Of course we must keep track of adults who are seeking asylum in this country, and deport them where justified. But this can be done through other means.
It is simply indefensible to do so at the cost of the mental and physical wellbeing of very young children.

I would also ask you to lift the paranoid Government secrecy which surrounds the work of the Immigration Centres. Your Government has consistently refused to provide total figures of the number of children detained.
This attempt to cover up such a morally reprehensible practice only makes matters worse.

The British people want us to take a world lead in the way we treat toddlers and children, not to inflict systematic cruelty on them behind a veil of Government secrecy.

I look forward to your urgent reply.

Yours

Nick

Read the full Daily Mail story by Jason Groves  here

“Whenever I hear about children from foreign  countries being put into detention centres, I think  how lucky I am to be living at number 32 Windsor Gardens with such nice  people as Mr. and Mrs. Brown.

Mrs. Bird, who looks after the  Browns, says if she had her way she would set the children free and lock up  a few politicians in their place to see how they liked  it!”

Paddington Bear

The full story can be found in The Independent where there was also a leading article on The cruelty of locking up child asylum-seekers.

In fact it has been an extraordinary few days for the end child detention campaign with a report of Beverly Naidoo and Karin Littlewood’s visit to Yarl’s Wood to run a reading workshop in the Bedfordshire Times & Citizen. Plus coverage of the barring of St Nicholas on ‘security grounds’ from the premises of Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre on Radio 4′s Sunday programme and the Daily Telegraph.