What is wrong with this picture? Four thousand foreign criminals who should have been deported are at large on the streets of Britain, released from detention centres because there is apparently no prospect of them being deported within a reasonable time.
Meanwhile, up to three thousand asylum seekers and economic migrants, a shocking percentage of them children, remain locked up in limbo within the UK Border Agency’s thirteen Immigration Removal Centres.
It seems that nothing whatsoever has changed in Britain’s Kafkaesque system of detention since 2006 when the news that more than 1,000 foreign criminals, including three murderers and nine rapists, had been freed instead of deported, almost cost Charles Clarke his job.
Handle: David Cameron and Theresa May say they are trying to get to grips with the immigration system
The then Home Secretary called the matter regrettable; yet he did not seem regard it seriously enough to be a resigning matter. In the intervening years, that number has somehow quadrupled.
Thank goodness then, that Theresa May has taken a stand. She used her speech at the party conference to announce new moves to amend immigration rules to stop foreign criminals resisting deportation, notably by invoking the Human Rights Act, in particular, Article 8, on the right to a private and family life.
Frustratingly, Ms May’s commendable if over-due plans were overshadowed by the ensuing 'cat-gate' row with Ken Clarke over the Bolivian immigrant whose argument for leniency included his joint ownership of a pet feline.
It is to be hoped that Ms May will be successful in pushing through the secondary legislation needed to modify UK rules so that more offenders can be legitimately removed. The figure of 3,775 criminals released rather than deported, revealed in a new report by UKBA chief inspector John Vine is certainly shocking. Sadly, it is a statistic which highlights the fundamental and persistent failures which are now endemic in Britain’s broken immigration detention system.
The United Kingdom has the largest network of immigration removal centres in Europe, with more than 3,000 places in 13 official centres, the majority of which – nine – are run, on behalf of the UKBA, by private contractors, including Serco, G4S, Reliance Secure Task Management and Global Solutions Ltd.
Around 30,000 individuals, the majority of them, asylum seekers, pass through the system annually. Of these, around half will be processed within an eight week period. The other 50 per cent are often stuck in the limbo of a complex and labyrinthine system of asylum hearings, appeals and case resolution procedures which can go on for months and years, at significant cost to the tax payer.
The conditions in which inmates are kept at these centres varies significantly, with the centre at Dover described last year by inspector Dame Anne Owers, as 'more like a prison'. Frustrated inmates regularly stage protests against inhumane treatment including - they claim - torture and physical abuse, prolonged detention and appalling conditions.
Incarcerated: An inmate in Colnbrook Immigration Reception Centre
Campsfield House, near Oxford, has been the scene of regular riots; Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire was burnt to the ground following a violent protest after an inmate was physically restrained by G4S staff. Detainees at both centres staged protracted hunger strikes only last year, declaring they were refusing food in a bid for their voices to be heard. Suicides are far from uncommon. A Moldovan man aged 35 killed himself at Campsfield House in August while two detainees were found dead at Colnbrook detention centre near Heathrow in July.
Unsurprisingly, it is difficult to obtain much information about Immigration Removal Centres or, indeed, about the workings of the system itself from the Home Office, which generally does not publish these facts and figures, most notably on the financial costs of immigration detention.
Latest numbers, reported to Parliament last year, indicated that the average overall cost per bed per day is £120, apparently taking into consideration exceptional costs, such as damage caused by fire and also by individuals suing for unlawful detention. Thus, if a centre such as Campsfield operates at 90 per cent capacity, it would cost an estimated £9 million per year to run. Given that there is a constant barrage of litigation from detainees seeking redress for illegal detention, or separation from their children, it would seem likely that the true costs of the system are much, much higher.
Like a prison: Asylum seekers and children are locked up in Colnbrook Reception Centre (pictured), while foreign criminals go free
The issue of children in immigration removal centres remains a thorny one, particularly for the Liberal Democrat coalition partners who made the ending of child detention a key element of their family values policies. In December 2010, Nick Clegg confidently announced that the detention of children would end in May 2012. Yet between May and August 2011, 697 children, a third of whom were unaccompanied, were held at the UK’s south-east ports. What exactly Mr Clegg intends to do with the ones who arrive inconveniently after next May’s deadline is not yet clear.
That 4,000 miscreants, among them murderers, rapists and paedophiles, have been released from an immigration detention system too hide-bound by red tape and European legislation to hold them is shocking.
Theresa May needs to move swiftly, to ensure that Article 8 is no longer used to place the family rights of foreign criminals above the rights of the British public.
However, the Home Office also needs to take immediate steps to tackle the deep-seated problems of an unstable and increasingly dangerous detention system where lone children are incarcerated, detainees are reduced to rioting in protest at inhumane treatment and suicide can sometimes seem like an acceptable alternative or a welcome release.(dailymail.co.uk)
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