As the government announces that Dungavel will no longer be used for the detention of children, but will be re-purposed as ‘a health check’ facility for families who are facing removal, young mother Sehar Shebaz and her baby are being transported in a prison van to Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire from where [...]
In the early hours of this morning, Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister issued a statement in which as part of a Tory commitment to put a cap on immigration it was agreed to put an end to child detention immigration controls (the latter was a Lib Dem proposal). End Child Detention Now believes that this [...]
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. [...]
It’s not usual to have five-year-olds and 15-year-olds in the same storytelling workshop. But there was nothing usual about the event that illustrator Karin Littlewood and I ran last December for imprisoned children. They were behind bars, not for committing some horrible crime but because they were asylum-seekers, and because we live in a society [...]
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 [...]
Refugee and Migrant Justice, a charity that provides legal advice and support to asylum-seekers and other vulnerable migrants in the UK, today issued a report Safe at Last. Children on the front line of UK Border Control which found consistent evidence of the government’s failure to abide by its safeguarding duties under Section 55 of [...]
Responding to Michael Morpurgo’s film on the detention of children at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, Home Office Minister Meg Hillier gave an astonishing interview in which she stated in response to a question from presenter Jo Coburn: Let’s be clear, nobody wants to see children detained. Certainly I don’t. But we do have an [...]
A Home Office commissioned report by Baroness Nuala O’Loan [now removed from the Home Office website with no archive link!] into a catalogue of serious abuses that detainees alleged they suffered at the hands of the UK Border Agency’s security contractors claimed not to have found evidence of ‘systematic abuse’, but did highlight alarming operational failures [...]
Campaigners for the release of young Afghani orphan Mashal Jabari were delighted to hear that following a judicial review being lodged the judge agreed the following interim measures: until another full age assessment is completed, Mashal is to be considered 14 years of age and placed with a foster family in Wales where he has some support. After [...]
A 14 year old orphan has been arrested & detained in Campsfield Immigration Removal centre near Oxford, which exclusively holds adult males, and is due to be deported because the authorities claim not to believe he is under 18. His older brother has refugee status — the authorities accept that the older brother is under 18. . .As they [...]
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