Month: September 2023

Detention centre report published


Enquiry into the the shocking treatment of immigrants at Brook House published

September 2023

In September 2017, BBC Panorama broadcast a programme, Undercover: Britain’s Immigration Secrets, into the shocking treatment of detainees at the Brook House detention centre near Gatwick in Sussex. It followed months of undercover filming to expose a wide range of wrongdoing at the centre. Those who watched the programme were treated to examples of what the report refers to as ‘the use of racist, abusive and derogatory language by some of the staff towards those in their care, the effects of illicit drugs and the use of force by staff on on physically and mentally unwell people’. An enquiry was commissioned in November 2019 and it was published today (19 September 2023) in three volumes.

It showed one custody officer place his hands around the neck of a detained person and say “you fucking piece of shit, because I’m going to put you to fucking sleep” (para 14). Using force to restrain detained people who were physically or mentally ill was common (43).

Conditions at the centre were extremely poor. It was run at the time by G4S and then by Serco both given contracts the report explains, based largely on price with little regard to quality aspects. Misgivings about the tenders were not put into practice (19). The Senior Management Teams were poor and largely invisible to junior staff.

Although conditions were poor to begin with, and the proximity to Gatwick added noise to the problems, the Home Office carried on adding numbers of inmates thus sometimes increasing to three the number of occupants in the cells. The cells had no privacy concerning toileting (25).

The report opens by saying that it was a matter of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. The combination of hostile attitudes to immigrants and refugees, the use of contractors who were unequal to the job, Home Office failures and seemingly no sign of inspections or visits from outsiders to see what was going on, combined to create a toxic mix of arrogance, cruelty and gratuitously bad treatment of people many of whom had suffered trauma and in some cases torture. Indeed, it is reported today that Suella Braverman, the current Home Secretary, stopped inspections taking place at all. Detainees were isolated from the outside world. Language barriers made things worse. Basic freedoms were curtailed the report said. This took place here in Britain.

Priti Patel was the Home Secretary during this time and in her many speeches and interviews she has made no secret of her hostile attitude to refugees and immigrants. She talked up the crisis and played a part in creating an atmosphere of disdain for those arriving, increasingly at the time, in small boats. One of her proposals for example was to install wave machines to prevent boat people from landing on our shores. That Britain took a far smaller proportion of refugees than many other nations was seldom mentioned.

It is sometimes easy in situations such as this to focus on the front line individuals behaving badly and one thinks of other undercover programmes in care homes and institutions where people with disabilities are living and where bullying and other failures have been exposed. They are the visible end result but their behaviour is in turn a result of failings further up the food chain by people less visible. It is the politicians who set the tone and agree the funding or more usually, the cuts to funding. It is the system which prefers outside contractors employed largely on who will do the cheapest job, who have weak management systems and whose main interest is turning in a profit. It is the media which perpetuates myths of ‘invasions’ and that immigrants are not really refugees but ‘economic migrants’ or even coming here to enjoy our bounteous benefit system. The combined effects of this hostility and disinformation was that someone poorly trained on the front line of an overcrowded detention centre feels it is acceptable to treat vulnerable people in the way they did.

Immigration, and in particular those crossing the Channel in small boats, is a political hot potato at present. The temperature is only going to rise as the election date gets nearer with attempts to ‘weaponise’ the issue for political advantage. We should all be aware however, that it is people we are dealing with in centres such as this and the majority are genuine migrants from war or persecution. A majority win their appeals.

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Group minutes and reports


Group minutes and reports for September

September 2023

WE are pleased to attach the minutes for our meeting in September 2023 thanks to group member Lesley for compiling them. We have titled this post as ‘minutes and reports’ because the group does not produce a newsletter but individual members submit reports on chosen topics such as refugees, the death penalty and the state of current human rights flavoured bills in parliament.

Minutes for September (Word)Download
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Refugee report – September


Full report on the current situation with refugees and asylum seekers

September 2023

Refugees continue to be a hot political issue and it is likely to be a hotly contested feature of the next general election. Stemming the flow of cross Channel arrivals is proving to be extremely difficult. This report goes into the current situation in some detail and we are grateful for group member Andrew for compiling it.

As Parliament returns and the conference season looms, small boat crossings are back in the news. Latest figures show more than 800 people crossed the Channel in small boats on 2nd September. The latest provisional government data put the figure at 872 people in 15 vessels, suggesting an average of about 58 people in each one.

The cumulative figure for 2023 now stands at a provisional 20,973. The previous high for a single day this year was on 10 August when 756 people made the crossing. The total for the year so far is still lower than at this time last year, when 25,000 people had made the journey. The record for a single day since current records began in 2018 was 1,295 on 22 August 2022.

This week (one day into the new parliamentary session) Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick set out the next stage in the government’s immigration clampdown. Alongside the Illegal Migration Act against arrivals on small boats, he opened a second front focusing on people who employ, house or otherwise abet illegal immigrants.

Businesses that employ undocumented migrants are already liable to fines, and landlords are obliged to check whether prospective tenants have permission to reside in the UK. The penalties for not doing so will be increased threefold (up to ten times for a repeat offence).

A new focus of the policy is the pursuit, by the so-called professional enablers taskforce, of lawyers “who help migrants abuse the immigration system.” This follows newspaper reports earlier this year of cases where solicitors had colluded in false asylum claims and wilful deception to get refugee status. The maximum jail term for conviction in such cases will be life imprisonment – longer than the 10-year tariff reserved for extreme cases of fraud; longer in fact than the 14-year maximum for indecent assault of a child. The maximum penalty need not be the standard, but it is still revealing that the government thinks lawyers who help migrants break the rules (in ways not yet specified) should spend so long behind bars. It was noted that this only seems to apply to lawyers, not to Home Office staff…

Both these new crimes are already illegal; the only difference is the increased supervision and penalties. Colin Yeo at Free Movement has noted an increase in activity at the Home Office. These are his comments and summary of the current situation for migrants:

“The Times reported on 3 September 2023 that just over 2,000 asylum decisions were made in the previous week. Some of these may have been so-called “withdrawals” — essentially, the Home Office taking an asylum seeker off the books for some minor perceived or actual administrative failure by the asylum seeker — but it looks like a lot of proper decisions must be being made as well. This is reported to be in large part because full asylum interviews have been dropped for asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Libya, Syria and Yemen and certain claims from Sudan”.

Basically, it sounds like nationals of those countries are simply going to be granted asylum, subject to security checks. This change is in line with the historic trend of allowing more claimants to stay. The number of asylum seekers returned in 2006 was 18,000, against in 2022, 4,000 (and most of those voluntary.)

The 3 countries with the most applications are Albania, Afghanistan and Iran. Interestingly, the percentage of grants for them are 19%, 98% and 76% respectively.

The overall asylum grant rate for the year ended June 2023 was 71%. Of those who appeal against a refusal, a further 53% win their appeal. So, lots of asylum decisions mean lots of newly recognised refugees plus a relatively small number of failed asylum seekers.

What happens when asylum is granted?

When an asylum seeker is granted asylum, they will have to leave their Home Office-funded asylum accommodation and they will lose their Home Office-funded asylum support. That’s good; asylum accommodation is terrible and asylum support is miserly. It’s part of transitioning properly into British society. They will be granted leave to remain for five years. In theory this can be taken away if their country becomes safe; in practice this is very unlikely. At the end of the five years, they are eligible to apply for settlement, formally called indefinite leave to remain or sometimes permanent residence.

Once they have that grant of legal status and proof of their legal status the idea is that they can either find a job and a place to rent or they can access mainstream welfare benefits if they need to. They absolutely need proof of their legal status because employers will not usually give anyone a job without such proof, nor will landlords rent property to anyone without such proof. At the moment the fines for doing so are £15,000 per worker and £1,000 per occupier respectively. These are due to rise to £45,000 and £5,000 per person at some point in the near future .

And you cannot claim normal welfare benefits without proof of your legal status either, so the Department of Work and Pensions will simply send you away.

The problem is that the Home Office is failing to issue proof of legal status (called a biometric residence permit) promptly but evicting recognised refugees from their asylum accommodation and cutting off asylum support anyway. Newly recognised refugees have no prior notice of what was coming — after waiting for years for a decision, remember — and will have just a few days to find a job or contact their local authority for support.

The result is that a newly recognised refugee will often find themselves with no asylum support but also unable to work or rent accommodation and unable to to access the welfare benefits to which they should theory be entitled. They will almost inevitably therefore be homeless. They will become the responsibility of the local authority where they were then resident.

Local authorities have had as little notice as the refugees themselves.

Free Movement also have thoughts about the Illegal Migration Act:

“If the Illegal Migration Act is ever activated, the government’s plan is that every asylum seeker arriving after an as-yet unannounced date will either be removed to Rwanda or kept in the UK in a new perma-backlog. None of them will ever receive an asylum decision here in the UK. There will be no recognised refugees in future.

“There are two ways it might play out in practice.

“If it goes according to plan, the removal of a relatively small number of asylum seekers to Rwanda will suddenly stop the boats or severely diminish the number of arrivals. Ongoing removals to Rwanda will be necessary to maintain the deterrent effect but not in significant numbers.

“No-one actually thinks that is going to happen.

“It is possible the government will strain every sinew to try and make it happen anyway, building huge detention camps and forcing ever-increasing number of refugees onto flights to Rwanda. Some may be deterred but undetected arrivals would probably increase and anyone not detained will simply disappear into the community rather than risk removal to Rwanda. There will be a large official backlog of people who are either in detention or who have disappeared who will in theory one day be removed to Rwanda. And there will also be a large but unknown number of people who arrived undetected and never claimed asylum because there was no longer any point in doing so.

“Needless to say, creating a large permanent-backlog of people who might one day be removed to Rwanda as well as an unknown number of unauthorised entrants who try to stay below the radar is a questionable integration strategy. The vast majority will in reality stay in the UK permanently, so this approach will cause huge social damage.”

A couple of other items:

  • The independent Conservative think tank, Bright Blue, have run a survey on public attitudes towards asylum seekers, which showed how divisive the issue is. On most aspects, half of respondents took a hard line and half a more liberal view. Bright Blue themselves favour a quota system for applicants with “humanitarian visas”. The research can be found at Alternative policies for the UK’s asylum system – Bright Blue
  • A local council has ordered the Home Office immediately to halt building work converting a former RAF base into accommodation for asylum seekers. West Lindsey district council served contractors with a temporary stop notice after a “breach of planning control” at RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire. The stop notice has been pinned to the gates of the base, home to the 617 Squadron that carried out the Dambusters raid during the second world war and was also the base of the Red Arrows. The Home Office hopes to accommodate up to 2,000 people there in what it says will be a cheaper alternative to using hotels, where approximately 50,000 asylum seekers are accommodated at a cost of about £6m a day.
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Death penalty report: August, September


September 2023

We are pleased to attach the latest death penalty report produced by group member Lesley for the period mid August to mid September 2023. As ever there is good news and bad with some countries engaged in heavy use of the penalty. China – believed to be the world’s largest executioner of its citizens – is briefly mentioned but detailed statistics are not available because they are a state secret. It is depressing to note in the UK, that following the conviction of Lucy Letby of murdering new born infants and attempting to murder others, a national newspaper ran a poll showing a strong majority to bring the death penalty back for such crimes.

August September (Word)Download
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Human rights laws ‘protecting terrorists’


Previous minister of Defence Ben Wallace protests at the ‘lunacy’ of rules such as ECHR
September 2023

Ben Wallace, the former Defence Secretary, has a piece on the front page of today’s Daily Telegraph (13 September 2023) under the headline “Wallace: Human rights laws protecting terrorists” written by Isabel Oakeshott and Daniel Martin.  The sub heading is “Ex-minister attacks ‘lunacy’ of rules such as the ECHR that block rendition of suspects’. 

He claims that human rights laws including the ECHR have become a serious risk to national security and are thwarting efforts to stop terrorists.  The two main reasons the ex-minister gives are that one, they are unable to kill individuals, usually by drone and two, we are unable to render people across borders or arrest people in countries whose police forces are unacceptable, means that we are more often than not forced into taking lethal action than actually raiding and detaining.  He says we are unable to carry out raids such as the US did to kill Osama bin Laden. 

It is an extraordinary article for a senior politician to have agreed to appear in a national newspaper.  Firstly, it is of a piece with a decade of fairly relentless attacks on the Human Rights Act (HRA) and the various promises to abolish or rewrite it which never seem to appear.  The benefits of the act for ordinary people in their quest of justice against the state does not get a mention. 

But the truly extraordinary part of it is the clear statement about wanting to murder people in a foreign country as a form of foreign policy.  We are quick to condemn foreign states such as Russia who attempted to murder a man in Salisbury for example, but seemingly, it is perfectly OK for us to murder a suspected terrorist in a foreign land.  In any event, how certain are we that the proposed victim is a terrorist and is plotting to carry out an attack here?  Last week, a suspected terrorist escaped Wandsworth prison and stayed away for 4 days with the finest of our security and police forces combing the country for him and with his photo on the front pages of our newspapers. In the events leading up to the Iraq war, our government and their security advisers were telling us that Sadam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons evidence of which was never found.

How certain can we be therefore that an attempt to murder a suspected terrorist in a foreign land would be successful in finding and killing the right person? Terrorist take great pains not to carry mobile phones and regularly move around. What about deaths of family members and possibly children?

There is also the moral point.  We are a member of the UN’s Security Council and as such, we should be promoting the law abiding behaviour in our and other’s international relations.  It is true that this is frequently ignored by a variety of nations, nevertheless, it would be difficult for us to adopt the high moral ground if we go around the world killing suspected terrorists ‘plotting against Briton’.

The article is full of dubious reasoning and bellicosity.  “Somalia may say you can blow up al-Shabab” he writes “because they’re our enemy as well, but if we go in and they surrender, we get told their detention pathway isn’t compliant [with ECHR law]. It’s a ridiculous catch-22 position, which doesn’t reflect the threat”.     

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Wine and rights


The Wine Society (UK) is paying special attention to human rights in its supply chain

September 2023

The Wine Society was formed in 1874 and flourishes today with many thousands of members and an enviable reputation for seeking out and supplying quality wines from around the world. In its latest newsletter to members (Issue 12, Autumn 2023) it has an article Announcing the fair treatment of workers in our supply chain explaining what the Society proposes to do to ensure human rights are observed throughout the supply chain.

Globalisation has produced many advantages for consumers in the West. Products and produce from around the world have arrived on our shores and into our high street stores to enable people to enjoy cheap clothes, out of season produce and a wide range of manufactures which, if made in the UK, would be many times more expensive.

But globalisation has come with some serious disadvantages for those far away who toil in the fields or work in sweatshops for minimal pay.  They have no rights, and suffer many abuses which would be unacceptable in the UK.  For many this is out of sight and some companies like it that way.  Recently, companies – and quite respectable (?) high street names – have shown to be using cotton picked by Uyghur forced labour in China.  We can remember the Rani Plaza collapse in Bangladesh in which several thousand died working in a vast sweatshop producing cheap clothes for several well-known high street UK stores. 

Many firms now pay attention to the issue of how things are produced and the labour abuses happening far away across the world.  However, after every incident which is discovered, we see those same firms express shock at the revelations and claim in written statements (noticeably: few actually appear on screen to face interviews) that they knew nothing and state their company policy which is that they take seriously the issue of human rights. 

The Wine Society is cautious in its approach recognising that policing what growers and vignerons do in far flung parts of the world is not easy. Their requirements include no use of forced labour or children; promoting worker participation; decent standards of accommodation where this is offered; paying a living wage and recognising the rights of local communities to clean air and water. They are about to roll out an independent whistle blowing line across their entire global supply chain. They are also supporting The Sustainable Wine Roundtable a global collaborative platform. The Society’s overall aim is to have the world’s most socially and environmentally sustainable wine supply chain by 2030.

This is a welcome development and a recognition that importers in the UK have a direct responsibility to ensure, as far as they can, that those producing their wares in far away places are treated decently and their human rights observed. It is all too easy to place a contract with a supplier containing well-meaning clauses which in turn sub-contracts to someone else and so on down the chain ultimately to families living in squalor, paid a pittance – if that is they are paid at all – with children working instead of going to school, all with complete deniability.

And the Society supplies very good wine.

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Talk about Palestine


‘Children of the Stone City’

September 2023

PAST EVENT

There will be a presentation by Beverley Naidoo, the author of Children of the Stone City concerning the life of children in the occupied territories. It will be held at the Methodist Church in Salisbury on Saturday 9th September starting at 2pm. Further details on the Salisbury Concern for Israel website https://www.sarumconcern.org. Tomorrow.

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