While the Con-Dem coalition government continues to implement all the racist immigration policies brought in by the Labour government during its 13 years in power, activists and the few remaining legal aid immigration lawyers continue to challenge these attacks, and have had some recent inspiring victories.
• On 21 May the Upper Tribunal of the Immigration and Asylum Chamber ruled that ‘in relation to the proposed administrative removal or deportation of one or both of his non-national parents, the welfare of a child, particularly a child who is a British citizen, is a primary consideration’. This was the latest in a series of crucial rulings over the past year, which have compelled the UK Borders Agency to pay far more attention to the effect that deportation of parents will have on their children.
• On 21 June, 30 protesters from No Borders and other groups blockaded the entrance to Colnbrook and Harmondsworth detention centres at Heathrow, successfully preventing Kurdish detainees being herded onto a charter flight deportation to Baghdad. Lawyers then obtained an injunction and the flight was cancelled. 49 of those due to be deported have now been released, with 15 remaining in detention, and all of them have been told that no further attempt will be made to deport them before the court of appeal hears a case relating to deportations to Iraq.
• On 6 July the family of John Freddy Suarez Sanchez learned that his attempted deportation to Colombia had been prevented for the third time. FRFI has been in touch with the Suarez family since 2009, when they first protested at Heathrow airport, leafleting passengers about to board the plane on which John Freddy was due to be deported, and succeeding in preventing the deportation. A further attempt to deport him was made in April this year and, when that was successfully averted, yet another attempt planned for 7 July. John Freddy and his family came to Britain when he was just six years old; he is now 23. When he was 17 years old he was imprisoned for seven months in a young offenders institute and, although, following his release, he committed no further offences and should have been considered rehabilitated, he became a victim of the government’s panic about ‘foreign criminals’. A European Court case is pending about his case and a judicial review has now also begun in the High Court.
• Also on 6 July, gay Tanzanian asylum seeker Eddy Cosmas was released from Harmondsworth detention centre, after an immigration judge removed his case from the ‘detained fast-track’ system and ordered a full hearing to take place after 5 September. This follows a big campaign by the Movement for Justice (MfJ) and others to highlight Eddy’s case. Following his release from detention Donna Stern, Co-ordinator of the international campaign By Any Means Necessary, of which MfJ is part, said: ‘In part Eddy won this because he was organising so much inside the detention facility that the authorities wanted him out of there!’
Success in all these cases has relied on active campaigning by families and activists in conjunction with legal challenges in the courts. Shortly after the charter flight deportation to Iraq was stopped, the Immigration Advisory Service (IAS), which had obtained the injunction, went into administration. IAS employed 300 staff at 14 locations and was the largest publicly funded provider of immigration and asylum advice, following the similar demise of the Refugee and Migrant Justice organisation a year earlier. Both organisations were bankrupted by changes to legal aid provision and procedures. Many Law Centres which provide free immigration advice are now fighting to stay open.
Nicki Jameson
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 222 August/September 2011
