Clare Sambrook, this article first appeared in openDemocracy 11 January 2011. ‘Much of the delay in concluding asylum and other immigration cases stems from poor quality decision-making when the application is initially considered,’ says Keith Vaz, chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee whose latest report on the UK Border Agency’s work is published today. [...]
End Child Detention Now is urging all its supporters to get behind the inspiring Citizens for Sanctuary prospective parliamentary candidate pledge campaign which is especially emphasising the scandalous detention of children by the UK immigration authorities. Dozens of PPCs have signed up to the pledge – but many more have yet to declare their support. [...]
Here are 3 key questions that we are urging supporters to ask their candidates during the current 2010 election with follow-up information. Postings to on-line discussion forums, calls to radio and TV phone-ins and direct questions at public meetings are strongly encouraged. We would also like to hear from you about candidates who have pledged [...]
Phil Woolas’s defence of the inhumane Yarl’s Wood removal centre reflects Labour’s shift to the right on asylum Simon Parker, The Guardian, Comment is Free, Thursday 25 March 2010, 15.00 GMT. Phil Woolas’s response to a further damning report on Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre by the chief inspector of prisons shows that the government has [...]
In an adjournment debate called by the Conservative MP for Bedfordshire North-East, Alastair Burt, the Home Office Minister, Meg Hillier, told the House of Commons that in the financial year 2008-09, 1,116 children entered detention. She went on to report that ‘some 539 of those children, slightly fewer than half, were removed, and 629 were [...]
END CHILD DETENTION NOW exposes UKBA’s misleading claims to parliament on damning medical report. This piece was written by Clare Sambrook and first appeared at OpenDemocracy 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 [...]
Campaign supporters gathered outside St Martin le Grand Church in the centre of York just before New Year to protest the detention of children in immigration removal centres over Christmas and to call for an end to all detention of children by the UK immigration authorities. The government’s Border Agency imprisons between 1,000 and 2,000 children [...]
Jeremy Corbyn MP for Islington North (second from right) joined with ECDN coordinator Esme Madill and Lulji Nuzi, Director of the Shpresa Programme and a group of young former refugees from Kosovo in presenting 200 hand prints made by refugee children all across North London together with many signatures collected by supporters of the campaign [...]
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 [...]
In today’s Guardian leading writers urge government halt to child detention: We have been disturbed by Guardian reports (Children made ‘sick with fear’ in UK immigration detention centres, 13 October) about the government’s detention of asylum-seeking children. Doctors’ findings that children at Yarl’s Wood suffered from confusion, fear, sleep problems, headaches, abdominal pain, severe emotional [...]
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