Since its re-election in May 2005, the British Labour government’s policies on immigration, immigration detention and ‘anti-terrorism’ have been criticised in not one but three reports from human rights watchdog bodies. Firstly, on 8 June, the Council of Europe (COE) Commissioner for Human Rights, Alvaro Gil-Robles, published a report of his visit to the United Kingdom in November 2004 which is highly critical of many aspects of British policy (see also article on ASBOs, p5). The following day, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) published its report into the treatment of Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act (ATCSA) detainees. Finally, on 20 June, Amnesty International published a report entitled UK: Seeking asylum is not a crime – detention of people who have sought asylum. NICKI JAMESON reports.
Immigration and asylum
FRFI believes that under capitalism there can be no such thing as a non-racist immigration control. And even within the measured tones of the COE report it is apparent that as soon as immigration and asylum are mentioned, the discussion becomes one about racism and xenophobia. The Commissioner openly laments that ‘attitudes openly hostile towards foreigners and foreign cultures are being expressed with increasing insistence and have even slipped, throughout Europe, into mainstream political discourse’.
In February 2003, the UK government announced a target of a 30-40% reduction in asylum applications, a target that it subsequently achieved. The COE Commissioner questions ‘the appropriateness of such an absolute objective prior even to the consideration of claims and regardless of the situation elsewhere in the world’, going on to say that ‘recent legislative changes…raise a number of concerns for the full respect of human rights in practise. These relate primarily to the increased use of detention, weakened procedural guarantees and reduced social assistance.’
Detention of asylum seekers
Both the COE and Amnesty International are disturbed by the increased detention of asylum seekers, and particularly of whole families including children. Amnesty concludes that it is the number of places available in detention centres that drives the numbers detained, and not vice versa.
According to Amnesty, the detention of asylum seekers in Britain ‘has a terrible human cost, inflicting untold misery on the individuals concerned and their families’. The organisation calls for ‘a statutory presumption against detention, and for an automatic and regular review by a court or similar competent, independent and impartial body of the lawfulness of the decision to detain.’
Although the government was recently forced to cancel plans to build ‘Accommodation Centres’ to house asylum seekers whose claims are being processed, mainly due to planning objections in the proposed localities, there are currently nine Removal Centres in Britain, primarily holding people who are about to be deported. There are plans for a further 1,000 places by the end of 2005, which will bring the total number of spaces to around 2,750.
Immigration detention under anti-terrorist legislation
Following 11 September 2001, the British government rounded up and detained without trial a small group of men who had sought asylum in Britain, having fled persecution, and in most cases torture, in their countries of origin. The House of Lords finally declared this detention unlawful in December 2004, but when the CPT visited the imprisoned men earlier that year, what they found was horrific. Examples include:
• a detainee at Broadmoor, ‘suffering from a most severe post-traumatic stress disorder…[who] has endured frequent episodes of verbal abuse by members of staff…as well as assaults from other patients.’
• a man in Belmarsh who ‘suffered from major physical disabilities… depression provoked by his detention had led to significant weight loss and a further loss of function, which necessitated the use of a wheelchair or crutches’.
• a detainee in Woodhill ‘with no previous history of psychiatric disorder, had developed depression and an anxiety disorder with panic attacks; he also displayed psychosomatic symptoms…he complained of dizziness, difficulties in breathing, a fast heart-rate, nightmares, concentration and memory problems. He also said that he had started speaking aloud to himself and that he had lost interest in most things.’
Control orders
Following the House of Lords judgement, the ATCSA indefinite detention provisions were replaced by ‘control orders’ introduced by the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005. The government turned defeat into victory by replacing a piece of repressive legislation that was only applied to foreign nationals with one that can be applied to anyone. A wide variety of restrictions can be imposed, ranging from prohibition of the use of specified articles or substances, restrictions on work and activities, through a range of restrictions on association, communication, movement and residence, up to the obligation to remain at a certain area or place, including house arrest.
There are two types of control order: those with the less stringent restrictions being described as ‘non-derogating’, while those which are more draconian are ‘derogating’. This refers to the need for the government to ‘derogate’ from, or opt out of, Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which forbids detention without trial, if it is to impose house arrest.
The COE report points out that there is ‘no precise dividing line’ between the two and describes the court proceedings in which ‘non-derogating orders’ are scrutinised as ‘inherently one-sided’, involving closed hearings, secret evidence and special advocates ‘unable subsequently to discuss proceedings with the suspect of the order’.
In essence, despite a thin veneer of cosmetic judicial scrutiny, the Commissioner concludes that ‘control orders are intended to substitute the ordinary criminal justice system with a parallel system run by the executive’.
Evidence from torture
Alvaro Gil-Robles also comments with horror on the British government’s refusal ‘to rule out taking evidence suspected of being obtained under torture into account …so long as the evidence was not extracted by, or with the connivance of, UK agents.’ In the Commissioner’s view this stance cannot be reconciled with the prohibition of torture in Article 3 of the ECHR – ‘torture is torture whoever does it, judicial proceedings are judicial proceedings, whatever their purpose – the former can never be admissible in the latter.’
The future
State attacks on human rights are set to continue. As ever, asylum seekers and refugees will be among the primary targets of repression but, following the London bombing, second and third generation immigrants, who already suffer from racist policing, will also once again come under attack. The media will, as always, play its part by ensuring that ‘foreigners’, ‘refugees’, ‘Muslims’, ‘Asians’ and ‘terrorists’ are conflated into a single image of ‘the other’, who to preserve Tony Blair’s ‘British way of life’ must be feared, vilified, legislated against, imprisoned and deported
FRFI 186 August / September 2005
