Photograph: Steve North/AP

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 Franks might be woken at dawn by perhaps a dozen security officers breaking down their door. Given only minutes to pack just a few belongings, they would be forcibly arrested and taken to a secure detention facility, for weeks or months, then, perhaps, returned to the country from which they’d fled. All this without having had access to a lawyer.

Had they resisted boarding a ‘removal flight’ Anne’s parents would have been handcuffed.

Unlike Miep Gies, we don’t have to risk our lives to protect the thousand or more children and babies who, with their traumatised parents, will experience the terror of UK Border Agency raids this year.

We can sign the petition at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/NoChildDetention, write to our MPs, open our eyes to the serious physical and psychological harm caused to children who are already among the most vulnerable members of our community. We can lend them our voices, and protest.

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 each year many for several weeks despite opposition from the Children’s Commissioner, several Royal Colleges of Medicine and over 100 MPs from all political parties. There is overwhelming evidence that detention is harmful to the health and well being of children, while the Home Office admits that families are very unlikely to abscond when removal directions are issued.

Campaign organiser Esme Madill said: ‘We know of several York families whose children were detained at Yarl’s Wood and who are still fearful of being taken to “the camp” again despite the fact that their case for asylum was subsequently upheld and that they have been granted leave to remain’.

‘No other civilised country treats vulnerable children in this way and we are determined to make 2010 the year when the government’s commitment to respect the rights of the child is genuinely upheld by closing these dreadful children’s prisons once and for all’.

Shpresa Vigil to End Child Detention 20 December 2009

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. In just two months 3000 people have signed the online petition, including Paddington Bear author Michael Bond and dozens of leading writers and illustrators, hundreds of health professionals, lawyers, teachers and social workers, Bishop Michael Campbell of Lancaster, Emma Thompson and Colin Firth. The St Vincent de Paul Society are committed to collecting signatures across the country on the paper petition. 70 signatures were collected from just one church in York on Sunday 13th December.

Lord Alf Dubs, who was himself a child refugee, said: “Congratulations on your petition and your campaign calling for an end to detention for child refugees. I very much support what you are doing and wish you all possible success.”

Luljeta Nuzi, the Project Director of the Shpresa Programme said: “When you are waiting to hear for a decision about your claim for asylum it is hard enough even without being detained. Putting children in detention is damaging, they can’t understand why they needed to be locked up. We have had to explain to them that it is because they have asked for asylum and they become very upset”.

Esme Madill of campaign group End Child Detention Now said: “It is the sad truth that each year around 1,500 children are detained in the UK. This costly and unnecessary policy is extremely harmful to children. We want Prime Minister Gordon Brown to think about these detainees as children first, and to give them the same rights to be free from fear and distress as other children”.

“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.

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 in halting the detention of children in Scotland has proved somewhat illusory. As Sandra White told the chamber:

Last year’s commitment to limit the detention of children in Scotland to a maximum of 72 hours appeared at the time to be a step forward. Unfortunately, the measure has simply resulted in children being taken from their homes to Dungavel, held for the maximum 72 hours and then transferred to Yarl’s Wood in England after that period has expired.

This is a cynical manipulation of the Home Office’s undertaking to the Scottish government to limit the detention of children and a shocking indictment of the UKBA’s claim that children’s welfare is paramount. As Sandra White continued:

The lip service that has been paid to the agreement and the way in which the Home Office is getting round the commitment that it made is shameful and totally unacceptable.

Fortunately, opposition to the scandalous detention of Scottish asylum seeking families continues to grow. As Christine McElvie told her fellow MSPs

It is, of course, not only members of this Parliament who stand opposed to child detention: many groups and individuals throughout civic Scotland have spoken out against a practice that they regard as an affront to every basic notion about the welfare not only of vulnerable children, but of any child.

I am also encouraged that more and more voices from other parts of the UK are being raised in protest at the detention of children. I have been in contact with a recently formed citizens campaign group in England, end child detention now, which has impressively quickly mobilised Westminster MPs, including a number of principled Labour MPs, to make public their opposition to the UK Government’s policy on detention. The members of that campaign aim to achieve in England the same media and public awareness of child detention that has been built up in Scotland. They are greatly encouraged by the Scottish Government’s consistent opposition to child detention and its efforts to find alternatives.

End Child Detention Now welcomes the continued attention and concern that members of the Scottish Parliament have shown with respect to the detention of children and families and is encouraged to see a cross party consensus on the need to create alternatives to imprisoning these most vulnerable members of our community.

]]> http://ecdn.org/2009/12/03/end-child-detention-now-praised-in-scottish-parliamentary-debate-on-child-detention/feed/ 0 http://ecdn.org/2009/11/29/home-office-select-committee-calls-yarls-wood-a-prison-for-children/ http://ecdn.org/2009/11/29/home-office-select-committee-calls-yarls-wood-a-prison-for-children/#comments Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:51:05 +0000 simon http://ecdn.org/?p=353

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 its report the Committee declares:

‘..it must be remembered that Yarl’s Wood remains essentially a prison…while we accept that conditions have improved, we still regret that such a facility is needed in the first place’.

Unfortunately the committee’s regret that the UKBA runs child prisons did not extend to recommending that the Home Office stop locking children up in them.

‘We are…willing to accept the detention of families and small children provided that this is for short periods of time which ideally are defined in advance, and when this is the very final stage in the immigration removal process’.

It is astonishing that the Select Committee could ignore the very clear advice from the Children’s Commissioner, Sir Al Aynsley Green that,

‘…depriving children of their liberty and detaining them for administrative convenience is never likely to be in their best interests and should be ended’

while they completely ignored the only peer reviewed medical research into Yarl’s Wood that showed that even short periods of detention are damaging to children’s physical and mental health.

The Select Committee’s argument that detention should only be used as ‘a last resort’ is one that the UKBA has repeatedly made—but all the evidence suggests that detention is being used more frequently against families and children to drive up immigration removal targets.

In declaring that ‘there is no evidence of families systematically “disappearing” or absconding’ the Select Committee has shown that one of the main arguments used by the Home Office to detain children and families is entirely bogus.

The figures given by the UKBA and on which the Home Office relies suggest that ‘nearly 1,000 children’ are detained each year, but the Select Committee was ‘unable to discover how many individual families with children have been detained in the last year’. The committee described the non-availability of such figures as ‘troubling’.  Even more troubling is that a third more children were detained in the last three months than in the previous quarter. According to Home Office’s figures released last week – 315 children entered immigration detention in quarter 3 of 2009, compared to 235 in the previous quarter. 240 of the children most recently detained were under 11 years old. The Home Office also declared that between July 2008 and July 2009 1,315 children were detained across ‘the detention estate’. The considerable fluctuations in these figures suggest that despite its scepticism the Select Committee is under-reporting the true extent of child detention, and that the Children’s Commission estimate of ‘nearly 2,000‘ detentions is much closer to the truth.

The Select Committee also appears to have completely accepted the ‘it’s all the fault of vexatious and frivolous legal challenges’ line from the Home Office without attempting to do more than cite one source from the National Audit Office on the number of unsuccessful requests for judicial review. In fact most challenges to removal succeed because, against all odds a handful of dedicated lawyers are prepared to challenge a shockingly high number of poor initial caseworker and immigration tribunal decisions.

Given the difficulties in accessing even basic, qualified legal advice very few detained families make applications for judicial review. In fact, judicial review is notoriously difficult for any regular plaintiff to achieve and the Law Society has rebuked Woolas for claiming that such cases were only brought to prolong an applicant’s stay. Thus far from indulging in ‘frivolous appeals‘, as Woolas misleadingly asserts, detained asylum seekers are more poorly served by the legal system and more heavily discriminated against than any other group in British society.

For example, in the case of the parents of a very young child all of whom were detained in Yarl’s Wood earlier this summer, we had to telephone 31 separate firms of solicitors before eventually finding a lawyer who was prepared to help. Such a task would have been impossible for the highly traumatised family concerned, and had it not been for this fortunate intervention, instead of winning leave to remain the family would have been forcibly returned to the country from where they fled persecution and arbitrary imprisonment – an irony that seems lost on their British government jailers.

Mr Vaz and his Select Committee colleagues may be willing to accept the detention of families and small children, but fortunately many of his fellow MPs and thousands of citizens and voters do not. Those who put the interests of children before the profits of the detention industry are rushing to sign Chris Mullin’s early day motion calling for child detention to end. Thousands more are signing the No10 petition in favour of keeping children in the immigration system out of jail. Please join us in declaring that imprisonment should be a ‘non resort’ not a ‘last resort’ for children. Together we can end child detention now.

But the pressure on the government to change its policy on locking up children is gathering pace – 91 MPs have now signed Chris Mullin and Peter Bottomley’s early day motion, while a House of Lords debate initiated by Lord Hylton on 4 November was an encouraging sign of how strongly many peers feel about the issue of family detention and just how feeble the government’s worn out and tired excuses come across. When Lord Spithead told the House of Lords that:

Detention should be used sparingly and for the shortest period necessary. We believe that that is especially true in the case of families with children, and that is reflected in our practice of not detaining families with children until close to their planned removal from the UK; they are usually detained just a few days before removal. There are some exceptions, but that is normally the case.

What the Under-Secretary for Security and Counter-terrorism (who with no trace of irony also carries the brief for the administrative detention of babies and children) fails to point out is that ‘some exceptions’ include literally hundreds of children who are routinely detained for more than 28 days. Well informed members of the House of Lords such as Lords Hylton and Avebury are not fooled by the Home Office’s attempts to disguise the vast scale of the detention industry and its human cost. Nor are readers of Henry Porter’s excellent article on Lord Spithead’s partner in spin, Lady Delyth Morgan, who is charged with connvincing parliament that the UK Borders Agency actively “promotes the welfare of children”- when the Children’s Commissioner for England  and HM Chief Inspector of Prisons have found found that at Yarl’s Wood, the UKBA does precisely the opposite.

Read the full Henry Porter article in Comment is Free here.

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 thoroughly checked, with ‘references always taken up’.

That begs the question: just how low were standards until now?
Actually, we don’t need to guess how bad things are in UKBA’s asylum-seeker prisons.

“State-sanctioned neglect”

Families fresh out of detention confirm in every detail the recent report (pdf) by paediatricians and psychologists in Child Abuse & Neglect who found that children detained at Yarl’s Wood were ‘clearly vulnerable, marginalized, and at risk of mental and physical harm as a result of state sanctioned neglect.’

The doctors recorded comments from parents about their children’s ‘sexualised behaviour’, about older children’s tendency to wet their beds and soil their pants, about the ‘increased fear due to being suddenly placed in a facility resembling a prison’, about the ‘abrupt loss of home, school friends and all that was familiar to them.’

The doctors reported 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.

Human suffering

To speak, as the government did this week, of giving children the ‘opportunity to thrive’ in the context of this moral calamity would be laughable if it were not for the human suffering behind every statistic.

Last weekend, immigration minister Phil Woolas revealed in a letter to Pete Wishart MP that 889 children from 488 families had been detained for more than 28 days between April 2004 and September 2009.

No matter how good the guidance, nor how diligently some people may follow it, the fact is that innocent children, whatever their immigration status, do not belong in prison.

It harms them. There is no need for it. There is no evidence that families with children are likely to abscond. The detention of asylum seeking children is absolutely unacceptable. It is state-sponsored child-abuse and it must stop.

End Child Detention Now has launched a petition calling upon the government to stop detaining children.

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 and behavioural problems, illuminate the deceit in UK Border Agency claims that: “Treating children with care and compassion is a priority.” Locking up innocent children in conditions known to harm their mental health is neither caring nor compassionate. Nor is it necessary. Families with children are the very least likely to abscond. Other countries have found more humane arrangements allowing families to stay together in the community while their cases are being considered, or before their return. Asylum-seeking children are already among the most vulnerable members of our society. Detention wrecks young lives. It must stop, now.

Kamila Shamsie, Jeanette Winterson, Gillian Slovo, Ian Rankin, Nick Hornby, Ali Smith, Hanif Kureishi, David Mitchell, Andrea Levy, Hari Kunzru, Joanne Harris, Mohsin Hamid, Liz Jensen, Nadeem Aslam, Chris Cleave, Esther Freud, Patrick McGrath, Louise Doughty,Tash Aw, Hisham Matar, Tahmima Anam,Toby Litt, Nikita Lalwani,Charles Palliser,Pankaj Mishra, Lisa Appignanesi, Peter Hobbs,Rachel Holmes, Alice Albinia, James Runcie, Amanda Craig, Aamer Hussein, Christina Koning,Robyn Scott,Sathnam Sanghera,Marie Phillips,Leon Arden,Yasmin Hai, Richard Hamblyn, Julia Williams,Helen Smith. John Hands,Lorna Gibb, Imran Ahmad,Sue Reid,Michael Newton,Lisa Gee,Clare Sambrook.

In less than a month since its list launch the No10 petition has signed more than 1,500 names (1,557 at time of posting), which is a tremendous achievement. In the meantime 81 MPs have now signed the Mullin and Bottomley early day motion with more names appearing every day, thanks in part to the tremendous media coverage this campaign has so far achieved. There are of course many more MPs who haven’t signed including some who think that detaining children is justified. We need to persuade them that detaining children is never justified under any circumstances – so if your MP says that locking up children is fine by him or her please 1) tell us (our contact details are on the menu column) and 2) write to your local paper, or contact your local radio to say how outraged you are and why you won’t be voting for them at the next election.