The most recent update on the Coalition Government’s promises to end child immigration detention is provided by a letter from David Wood of the UK Border Agency. It gives more specific details regarding the pre-departure accommodation, with which the UKBA plans to replace the current child detention facilities of Tinsley House. The title ‘pre-departure accommodation’ [...]
Simon Parker This article originally appeared in openDemocracy, 13 January 2011. In the High Court on Tuesday, Mr Justice Wyn Williams might have driven the last nail into the coffin of Britain’s infamous and long-running child immigration detention policy. The detaining of children for immigration purposes has been denounced as a ‘scandal’ and a ‘moral [...]
This article is reproduced by kind permission of Public Interest Lawyers Reetha Suppiah and Sakinat Bello and their young families are typical of the hundreds of recent victims of our immigration detention system. Over the course of their time in Britain, they have integrated into our society and formed significant ties to it. After years [...]
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. [...]
The New Statesman reports on a BBC investigation that government pilots involving 113 families in London and the North-West had given families with children just two weeks to voluntarily leave the country. Two families who refused to comply were taken into detention and deported shortly after and two families accepted voluntary re-settlement packages. Significantly only [...]
On Tuesday 26 October, a judicial review challenge to the Government’s family detention policy reaches the High Court in London. The Claimants – two single mothers and their young children – are seeking an order declaring the Government’s family detention policy unlawful. In May 2010, the Coalition Government announced that it would end the detention [...]
Today the charity Medical Justice launches the most comprehensive report on the harm done to children held in immigration detention. The 84 page ‘State Sponsored Cruelty‘ report is based on the findings of 141 cases involving children detained between 2004 and April 2010. “We welcome the report from Medical Justice as it highlights again the [...]
New immigration plans will end child detention but we should be wary of substituting one form of state abuse with another. Simon Parker, Comment is Free, The Guardian, Friday 28 May 2010. The announcement in Tuesday’s Queen’s speech that along with a cap on non-EU immigration, the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat government no longer intends to [...]
The first Children’s Commissioner for England, Sir Al Aynsley-Green, writing in The Guardian, calls on the government to release the families from Britain’s asylum prisons now. Aynsley-Green who has done more than any single person to expose the arrest and detention of innocent children, the injustices and sheer horror of their lived experiences, urges: ‘a [...]
This is the text of Positive Action’s Statement to Supporters of the Sehar must stay in Scotland campaign. We made a last minute plea this morning at 8.30 am to all the key players including Deputy Prime minister Nick Clegg, Immigration Minister Damian Green, Theresa May Home Secretary, but to no avail. Sehar Shebaz was [...]
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