Open%20borders%20The%20case%20against%20immigration%20controls%20-%20Teresa%20Hayter

Refugees: Tightening the Screw 113
provided with legal assistance to do so. People under the age of 18 should not
be detained, and asylum seekers should not be held with convicted criminals.
The British government, with Finland and Denmark, was the earliest in
Europe to engage in the practice of detaining asylum seekers. But others have
followed. There are now well over 100 detention centres in Europe.
Detention of asylum seekers is practised in the Netherlands, Germany,
Belgium, Greece, Norway, Switzerland, France, Italy, Austria, Spain,
Portugal, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, the Slovak Republic and
Hungary, and also in the United States and Australia. In March 1997 FASTI
(the Fédération des Associations de Solidorite avec les Travailleurs Immigrés)
organised a conference in Lille, entitled ‘Europe Barbelée’ (whose proceedings
were edited by Jean-Pierre Perrin-Martin). Delegates described the detention
situation in their countries. In France, in the 1970s, administrative detention
of people who the authorities wished to deport took place in secret at Arenc
in Marseille, without judicial process, and caused scandal when it was
discovered. Since then, unlike in Britain, detention has been subject to
judicial process. It has a time limit of a maximum of 20 days and has to be
endorsed by a judge within 48 hours of the arrest. Detention is prior to
deportation and if deportation cannot be effected within the 20-day period,
the person has to be released. However the judges, who initially had
sometimes freed people and in 1992 condemned the minister of the interior
for assault, were progressively, and especially under the Pasqua laws,
transformed into appendages of the administrative process. A further scandal
occurred when a report by the European Committee for the Prevention of
Torture revealed in 1990 that foreigners were being kept in a detention
centre in a basement under the Palais de Justice in central Paris, in inhuman
and degrading conditions. At FASTI’s Lille conference Sabine Mariette, a
judge, said the report revealed that ‘foreigners were dumped in rooms
without sanitary arrangements worthy of the name, sharing mess tins to
eat’, and subjected to violence by the Paris police, while the judges
pronouncing on their detention in the courts above them refused to take the
trouble to go downstairs to observe their situation. However, when in 1995
a man barely able to walk after this treatment was brought before a judge,
this particular judge decided to see for himself; when the police refused entry
to the lawyers representing the man, the judge ordered the release of all 22
occupants of the detention centre. Now, according to Sabine Mariette, ‘They
are trying to scrap the role of the judge.’ Twenty-six new detention centres
were opened in France after the mid-1980s. In addition, a small number of
foreigners who have resisted deportation, around 100, are locked up in
detention centres for periods of up to three months, again after judicial
process. At the FASTI conference Madgiguène Cissé, spokesperson of the
Saint Bernard sans-papiers in Paris (see p. 142), said:
When people are picked up for questioning, you don’t know where you’ll find them.
... We came across a secret detention centre, one, that is, which isn’t on any of the