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

Refugees: Tightening the Screw 117
be detained’, blithely disregarding the fact that most of those locked up have
not ‘offended’ at all, under any definition, that many of them subsequently
attain the holy grail of refugee status, and that most of them are eventually
released, for reasons which are no more clear than why they were detained
in the first place.
There is no time limit on detention. The 1999 act did not introduce one,
the government’s white paper merely claiming, in paragraph 12.11, that:
Often detainees are held for longer periods only because they decide to use every
conceivable avenue of multiple appeals to resist refusal or removal. A balance has to
be struck in those circumstances between immediately releasing the person and
running the risk of encouraging abusive claims and manipulation.
Amnesty International’s sample had been held for an average of five months,
which was slightly more than the average length of detention for all
detainees at that time; one person had been held for eight months without
receiving an initial decision from the Home Office. Some people are detained
for a few days, others for a year or more; one exceptional case was three
years. The absence of any release date for detainees, unlike for ordinary
prisoners, is one of the hardest and most demoralising aspects of detention,
especially for new arrivals in detention centres and prisons when they
discover that others have been incarcerated for months and even years.
Detainees, including some who are initially resilient and even cheerful,
gradually decline. Between 1987 and 2000 at least nine asylum seekers
committed suicide or for other causes died in various forms of detention. A
report by C.K. Pourgourides and other medical practitioners, entitled A
Second Exile, gives a full account of the effects of detention on the mental and
physical health of detainees, including many examples and quotations from
detainees themselves. It says, ‘the responses to detention, namely hopelessness,
helplessness, powerlessness, despair, despondency, demotivation,
distress, anxiety and so on are predictable and understandable. They are
normal responses to an abnormal situation.’ And it concludes:
Detention, based on the evidence presented, ... recreates the oppression from which
people have fled. It places detainees in predicaments parallel to those they may have
faced under torture or previous detention. It maintains the mechanisms of persecution
which precipitated their flight. Detention is therefore clearly abusive and inhumane.
This report has presented compelling evidence against detention, which is a noxious
practice which should be opposed on medical and humanitarian grounds.
A Nigerian detainee sent the Campsfield Monitor the following poem from
Bullingdon prison, where he was imprisoned following a protest at
Campsfield detention centre, which said something similar:
Arrived;
Immigration;
Interrogation;