Sentenced to uncertainty: life in the UK's immigration detention centres

Jul 04, 2018

Written By Becky Kells, Editor, AllAboutLaw

Donald Trump’s controversial separation at the border policy, which he ended yesterday after mounting pressure, calls into question the way in which countries treat undocumented individuals. We take a look at the UK’s immigration detainees, who never know how long they could be held.

“Detention is worse than prison because in prison you count your days down and in detention you count your days up… and up… and up.”

These are the words of an anonymous detainee in a British removal centre, describing what it is like to be imprisoned without a release date.

To indefinitely detain someone – that is, to detain them without giving them a time limit or a release date – seems contrary to the values of the British justice system. Yet there are nine detention centres across the UK, which hold detainees on immigration-related, administrative grounds. Across the country, 30,000 people are held in administrative detention per year.

A person may find themselves in a detention or removal centre if they have attempted to enter the UK without authorisation, if there are issues verifying their identity, or if an asylum claim has been rejected and there are efforts in place to remove them from the UK. These people have no idea when they might be released – and if, when they are, it will be into a UK community or onto a chartered flight back to a turbulent country.

The process of detaining immigrants sits precariously amidst conflicting political stances on refugees and asylum seekers, and constantly changing legislation surrounding asylum claims. Out of all of the detainees held in British detention centres, about half are released without being deported, and the percentage of those being deported has decreased gradually over the past few years. Every year, the government must pay £4m of compensation to victims who have been unlawfully detained in its detention centres.

A notorious name: life at Yarls Wood

People being held in these detention centres face a bleak lack of options. The availability of legal aid and the prospect of getting a judicial review are both scarce. It is possible to get a bail hearing, but these are rushed processes, carried out via video link to save time, with judges presiding over six cases per day.

Yet perhaps most controversial is the lack of release date and even lack of a typical detention time period. By June 2017, 172 individuals had been held in detention for 1-2 years, and 28 had been detained for longer than that.

The plight of these detainees – many of whom have a complex array of mental health problems, due to experiences that brought them to the UK in the first place – has been recognised by the Bar Council, which commissioned Dr. Anna Lindley of SOAS University to research detention centres in the UK.

The Bar Council said: “Holding someone in indefinite administrative detention runs counter to basic principles on which the Rule of Law is based. It creates a stain on the reputation of our system of justice for fairness and for providing access to justice for all.”

At one notorious detention centre – Yarls Wood Immigration Removal Centre, which detains women and family groups – detainees saw no other option than to go on hunger strike in February, in an attempt to bring about reform in Yarls Wood and other detention centres. Yarls Wood, like a number of other UK detention centres, is owned by a private security company; detainees undertake menial work for wages of about £1 per day. A statement on the Yarls Wood website from its manager, Steve Hewer, said: “Our role is to provide a caring, yet safe and secure environment for all our residents at Yarl’s Wood IRC. We do this by promoting Trust, Care, Innovation and Pride within the centre, and this is at the forefront of all our policies and procedures”.

The women detained indefinitely in Yarls Wood paint a very different picture. Vivian, a woman from West Africa with experience of domestic abuse, rape, homelessness and female genital mutilation (FGM) in her home country, describes an environment far from the trusting and caring one portrayed by Hewer.

“Sometimes, when other women were being removed and we were locked in our rooms, you could hear them through the doors, shouting and screaming. I will never forget that. I always thought they were going to send me back, to where I was terrified for my life.”

Vivian also describes not knowing that her experiences in her country made her eligible to submit an asylum claim – something she was informed of by fellow detainees rather than staff at the detention centre.

In the hunger strike, detainees refused work, food, healthcare, and use of the Centre’s shop in an attempt to bring about change to the “archaic” nature of the detention centre. Their list of demands extends to all areas of detention, but they have called for a 28-day detention limit, and for the Home Office to respect the international human rights conventions in detention centres. They have also requested due processes to precede imprisonment on immigration matters and access to bail hearings.

For detainees in Yarls Wood and beyond, the common point of disbelief is that such places can exist in a country like the UK. In particular, detainees who have lived in the UK for decades – or indeed their entire lives – struggle to comprehend the realities of being detained by the government. One detainee said: “I feel like the specifics of my case were completely ignored – my long-term detention came down to the fact I was a foreigner, little else. My experience in detention broke the trust I had in the Government, and the country I have lived in for the last 20 years.”

Vulnrability, torture, and the Rule of Law

The Bar Society’s view – supplemented by Dr Lindley’s report – is that indefinite detention is in direct contrast to the Rule of Law in the UK. The Rule of Law prioritises liberty, and states that there must be a just reason to override it. When a person has been a victim of their own country or society, and has fled that country, it makes little sense to detain them on administrative grounds.

Administrative detainees are not automatically granted an audience with a judge, as is the case for those held on remand pending criminal charges. For administrative detainees who want to challenge their detention, there are a number of obstacles to surmount.

Currently, detainees can only be granted legal advice after a means and merits test has occurred – and those who are eventually granted advice are given just 30 minutes to explain their case. Out of the detainees involved in the Bar Council Research Report, 49% of detainees were unable to take up their 30 minutes of legal aid – a service which was diminished following the scrapping of a number of legal aid initiatives in 2012. Detainees also report long waiting times to see a legal adviser; a cause for concern as for many, deportation could happen at any moment. When it published the decision to cut legal aid for immigration centres, the coalition government of 2012 said: “individuals in immigration cases should be capable of dealing with their immigration application, and it is not essential for a lawyer to assist.”

As Dr. Lindley wrote in her 2017 research report, “In many ways, everyone is vulnerable in detention”. Often, detainees come to the centres with vulnerabilities caused by the reason that made them leave their original country: wars, gendered violence, abuse, persecution and torture. At times, detainees may arrive physically and mentally sound, but being detained for an indefinite amount of time may cause them to deteriorate. In Stephen Shaw’s 2016 review into the welfare of vulnerable people in detention, he found that: “Quite apart from feeling unsafe in the immigration detention environment, their sense of insecurity is often exacerbated by fear of what the future holds and where that future will be. They may also believe, rightly or wrongly, that those who exercise power over them be detaining them also hold the key to their future.” There are significant indicators that life in a detention centre can cause someone to become ‘vulnerable’.

In theory, the Home Office is against detaining those who have been tortured – but the definition of torture was narrowed in September 2016 to exclude acts of torture carried out by a non-state actor. Many detainees come from countries where rebel factions and terrorist groups gain control over certain areas – the Bar Council reported that an Afghan man was kidnapped by the Taliban and subject to beatings with “knives, sticks and a gun, and the court heard his injuries were consistent with his account”. Yet because the Taliban is not a state, the new definition of torture does not apply to him – nor does it apply to the women who report sexual violence at the hands of warring factions in civil disputes.

As it stands, abusive and often life-changing experiences are categorised in a bureaucratic method in order to assess whether someone has been tortured or not. Detainees are not granted the time to explain their situation, and often feel too ashamed or traumatised to reveal it in a situation where there is no trust.

With so many intersecting issues in the current system of immigrant detention, it can be hard to know where to start in fixing it. However, the psychologically distressing factor that unites all detainees is not knowing how long they might be held for. A 28-day time limit would prevent individuals from being lost in the system, as well as give them a defined timeframe to plan legal appeals or challenges. Tighter regulations in not allowing torture victims and other vulnerable individuals to be detained would make the processes of evaluation quicker for those who are detained. However, with challenges originating from within Yarls Wood as well as from the Bar Council, it’s clear that legislative change is needed to fix this flawed system.

Source: 'Injustice in Immigration Detention' - Research Report by Dr. Anna Lindley, commissioned by the Bar Council

Image: iDJ Photography

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