News of the death of Miep Gies reminds us that an ordinary Dutch family summoned extraordinary courage to shield German refugees, the Franks, from the Gestapo. Until the Nazis invaded Holland, Anne Frank’s family had been able to find work and safety in their adoptive country. If they had fled to present day Britain, the [...]
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 [...]
The Shpresa Programme – a charity for Albanian-speaking refugees, asylum seekers and migrants was joined by its members, friends and supporters for a candlelit vigil on behalf of children in detention over the Christmas period. The vigil which was held at the Lifeline Community Church in Dagenham, Essex is part of the End Child Detention Now campaign. [...]
We are pleased to pass on this message from Paddington Bear to all our supporters, which the writer Michael Bond OBE (and No10 petition signer) has been kind enough to forward: “Whenever I hear about children from foreign countries being put into detention centres, I think how lucky I am to be living at number [...]
On Wednesday 2 December the Scottish Parliament held a business debate on the detention of children at Dungavel immigration removal centre. The debate, sponsored by SNP MSP Sandra White (Glasgow) revealed an unprecedented cross-party consensus against detaining children in immigration removal centres such as Dungavel. However, the progress the Scottish government thought it had made [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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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