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

116 Open Borders
In Britain detention is still for longer periods and with less judicial control
than in other European countries. In an Observer league table of human
rights abusers published on 24 October 1999, Britain scored worse than any
other EU country, and worse than a long list of Third World countries. This
was presumably because the criteria for rankings included arbitrary arrest
and detention without trial. Amnesty International has argued, for example
in Prisoners Without a Voice, that Britain is violating article 5 of the European
Convention on Human Rights, article 9 of the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights, the UN Body of Principles for the Protection of All
Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment, and recommendations
of the intergovernmental Executive Committee of the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Britain violates virtually all of the
UNHCR’s guidelines (see above). In particular, numerous unaccompanied
minors have been detained, including in Campsfield for example, 13-year-old
girls, who have false passports for women in their thirties, whose denials are
systematically disbelieved and whose birth certificates, if they can be found
and sent to them, are said to be ‘forgeries’.
Under the 1971 Immigration Act British immigration officials have a
virtually unrestricted power to detain, after cursory examination, any person
seeking to enter or remain in the United Kingdom who is subject to
immigration control. There is no judicial oversight to their decisions. When
the act was passed it was intended that these powers would be used to detain
for brief periods, pending imminent removal, people refused entry to Britain
as visitors, students or workers, and people caught as ‘overstayers’. It was
not intended that it would routinely be used to detain asylum seekers, as it
was from the mid-1980s onwards. The overwhelming majority of asylum
seekers are detained, moreover, not at the end of the process, after their
claims have been rejected and pending their removal, but at the beginning.
In 1998–99, according to the Home Office’s Statistical Bulletin, ‘around 40
per cent of those detained had applied for asylum at ports of entry’, and were
therefore not even in a technical sense, contrary to common belief, ‘illegal
immigrants’. Government claims that nearly all detained asylum seekers are
bogus and have had their claims rejected are presumably based on the fact
that, having initially been detained at the time they made their claim, they
may still be in detention months later when the Home Office rejects it and
after they have lost their appeals. Amnesty International carried out a survey
of a representative sample of 150 asylum seekers in detention in June 1996;
it published the results in a report written by Richard Dunstan, entitled Cell
Culture. Eighty-two per cent of these asylum seekers had been continuously
detained since the time of application for asylum. Eighty-seven per cent had
been detained before the Home Office had made a decision on their case. Less
than 7 per cent had been detained solely to achieve their removal, and even
they had already spent long periods in detention. The Labour government’s
1998 white paper stated baldly, in paragraph 12.1, that ‘Effective
enforcement of immigration control requires some immigration offenders to