First the child is led into a small holding room.  She waits.  Her mother is visibly shocked, the stressed lines of her face and swollen eyes awash in tears. An hour or two pass; a television is stuck on one channel as the incessant rabble of another world enters the surreal shock of her horror.   The confusion is not dissipating; the questions are not being answered.  Her mother fills out the forms, her hand shaking.  Once processed the girl is led through eight to ten heavy locked doors.  Before reaching the Crane Wing, she is thoroughly searched and then led past a barred cell door .

Taken in the middle of the night from her home by five private security guards and ushered into a caged black van, the child is dazed with fear.  No one explains what is happening.   The days go by, and then the weeks and until without warning, near dawn, the mother is dragged off the bed, her wrists and feet handcuffed and thrown once again into same caged black van.  The girl by her mother’s side cries as the doors slam shut, driven off into the early morn.

The sun is still behind the horizon.  The air cold and acrid as the mother attempts to comfort her child. Once at the airport, the mother is pulled out of the van by three of the men, dragged across the tarmac.  The girl is hysterical.  As they attempt to  board the plane,  the commotion is so bad the pilot refuses to take off.  The two are removed from the plane and driven back to Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre (IRC), the UK’s second largest facility for women and child asylum seekers.

It’s November 2007 and Kurdish Turk born Meltem Avcil now 14 years old still trembles at the experience.  Her mother’s face is healing from the scrapes; her wrists are still slightly bruised.  And so now again they wait for the heavy knock on the door of their small bedroom at the center.    Terrified, they can only pray for justice in a system that has gone horribly wrong.

Global, economic and political problems help define the risks of a modern society.  Within that spectrum, immigration and in particular, UK asylum seekers are being confronted with a host of problems.  The insipid fear of the other has gripped the UK’s conscience and politicians are anxious to pass measures in a desperate attempt to create a sense of security founded on modern society’s obsession with migrants and the potential risks they represent.

The Home Office’s executive summary has defined immigration as a threat and outlined an obtuse program to “perform border checks on people before they travel to this country, targeting high risk routes through effective analysis of threat and risk.”  While inside the borders, the Home Office will implement a system to expedite asylum seekers while “improving detention throughout and tagging or monitoring all asylum claimants.”

All asylum seekers and non-EEA nationals wishing to enter the UK require biometric identification.  The Border and Immigration Agency is tasked to  “target electronic background checks on 30 million people, start checking fingerprints at the front line and, increasingly from 2009, count visitors in as they land and count them out as they leave.” The wording itself suggests a battle-like scenario, a fight on the frontlines.  These quotes are lifted verbatim from their respective online reports.

Dr. Jagdish Bhagwati, professor of economics at Columbia University and WTO critic, believes the manifested ramifications of imposing severe and strict regulations to prevent immigration are counter-productive.  Policing and enforcing such policies requires dictatorship-like governments he says in his BBC interview with Lars Bevanger. At the World Banks’ ABCDE gathering he argued against the management mentality of institutions attempting to curtail the flow of immigration.  “Instead of trying to help them, we try to stop them,” Lars Bevanger reports him as saying.

For Habib Rahman, Chief Executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, the Government’s attack on immigration and asylum seekers is unprecedented. “It seems this Government is looking to set a record for the number of immigration-related bills it can introduce,” the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCADC) reports him as saying earlier this year.  As the Government attempts to control immigration and fast-track asylum seekers, it begins to lose sense of humanity.  In its place, a system of madness and absurdity is taking shape. The mute have no choice but surrender.

Most IRCs are run by private companies, contracted to the IND under the auspices of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP).   As such, the Government’s involvement with IRCs is mostly administrative, not judicial.   Yarl’s Wood IRC is managed by Serco, “probably the biggest company you’ve never heard of,” according to the Guardian.   Serco has numerous international and national contracts for defense, prisons, detention centers, health, and education.

The tenth report of session 2006-2007 on the treatment of asylum seekers issued to the House of Lords and House of Commons Joint Committee on Human Rights sought to remind the Government of its international obligations in its treatment of asylum seekers.  But the administrative barriers and political ramifications of appearing weak are failing the victims.   The polemics of straining the social services, housing, and health care system is too powerful.  Reports alone cannot change the system.

For years Yarl’s Wood IRC has been the center of criticism from human rights groups, media, as well as government inspectors.  In October 2007, the Independent reported on 200 cases of physical and racial abuse against female asylum seekers at IRCs. The New Internationalist published an anonymous first hand account of how Yarl’s Wood IRC staff inflict mental, physical and racial abuse on female asylum seekers.  “They treat you like you’re nobody. What can you do? You’re hopeless.  There’s nothing. Nobody,” writes a Somali woman, currently detained at Yarl’s Wood IRC. She claims women protesting their conditions are sent to isolation and many have no legal representation.  One woman who led the hunger strike in July was sent to Holloway Prison.  The women, some rape victims, are intimidated by male staff who intrude on their privacy.

Since May 2005, Yarl’s Wood is a flagship IRC for the IND’s New Asylum Model and integral to the Home Office Five Year Strategy to process up to 30% of cases using a fast-track system. And yet it continues to criminalize asylum seekers.  Some of the children, only babies, were born in the UK.  Yet even UK born children don’t escape the frenzied exodus.

Despite having ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1992, the UK entered a clause to abolish those rights if the child in question is not a UK citizen. In response to recent allegations of abuse at the IRCs, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has repeatedly criticized the UK for undermining universal rights of all children. “Every child matters, but some matter less than others – especially Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children,” wrote UK Children’s Commissioner Dr. Albert Aynsely-Green in January as an acerbic response to the Government’s presumptuous report, ‘Care Matters: Transforming the Lives of Children and Young People in Care.’

Anver Jeevanjee, a 20-year veteran and former member of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (AIT) claims in her December 2006 interview with the Guardian that immigration judges privately harbor racist sentiments. The article goes on to say that women are used as soft targets to lower arbitrary Government established asylum figures.  A study by the Black Women’s Rape Action Project and Women Against Rape found immigration judges dismiss two thirds of asylum seeking women who’ve claim to have been raped.

Given Yarl’s Wood IRC priority of fast tracking, most asylum cases are immediately rejected despite evidence.   More than a quarter of the women processed had no legal representation and 70% of those claiming rape were denied access to a doctor, psychiatrist or other support mechanism. The Home Office flat out dismisses 80% of asylum applications.  According to the Guardian, an Ethiopian Muslim woman, victim of gang rape, had her asylum request denied by an immigration judge because she didn’t report the rape to her family.

A group of European MEPs visited Yarl’s Wood IRC and criticized the center for the oppressive confinement of detained children.  The Bedford Today newspaper cites Jean Lambert, Green Party MEP for London, as saying in reference to Yarl’s Wood IRC, ”There is both a principle of detaining children, and the length of time they are being detained.  Some we are told, are being detained for one or two days.  But one family has been there for 89 days.”  The MEPs final report is due early next year.

Article 37 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Child states detention is a last resort.  The child should then only be detained for a very limited amount of time.  In the UK, the limit is supposedly 28 days. “To date, I have not refused any request for extended detention,” said Minister for Nationality, Citizenship and Immigration, Liam Byrne, when asked by Lord Judd of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. The UN Minimum Standards and Norms of Juvenile Justice require the state to set a minimum age at which point it is illegal to deprive a child of his or her liberty. The UK has set no such age limit.

The institutions are in place, the money is allocated, the technologies upgraded, the media hounds the other as the politics flagrantly violate basic human rights. In July, the Home Secretary issues a report ‘Fair, Effective, Transparent and Trusted: Rebuilding Confidence in Our Immigration System.’  The words are carefully selected. But at Yarl’s Wood IRC at the very same moment, parents stage a hunger strike.  36-year old Maud Lennard from Zimbabwe was on the verge of collapse after refusing to eat for an astounding 53 days.  An outspoken critic of Mugabe, she was active in the women’s wing of the opposition MDC.  She fled the country in 2004 after receiving numerous death threats and eventually ended up on her deathbed at Yarl’s Wood ICR.

A month later, 35-year old Abiy Fissiha hangs himself in Liverpool.  His asylum request was refused.  Another statistic, he became the 25th UK asylum seeker to commit suicide in the past five years.

The Immigration Advisory Service (IAS), a publicly funded independent organization, compiled a report on the Home Office’s country information bulletins. Lawyers and immigration judges rely upon these bulletins, according to the IAS. They cross-examined Home Office sources with seventeen Home Office country assessment guidelines.  IAS findings indicate the bulletins contain “basic inaccuracies, use out-of-date material, omit detail potentially relevant to an asylum claim, mislead presentation of material, falsely positive outlook, and are ripe with plagiarism and use of inappropriate sources.”

The Home Office’s assessment of Turkey banning virginity testing relies exclusively on a report by the US Department of State.  However, while the US report says the practice is generally banned in Turkey, it also states that in five provinces, 99% of females are forced into the procedure. IAS claims the Home Office selectively omitted this information from their report, thus painting a more positive picture of Turkey.

Asylum seekers from Turkey, like the Kurdish  Meltem Avcil and her mother, are subject to repressive UK policies based on false and manipulated information.  They represent the victims of a modern risk society obsessed with security for security’s sake.  Handcuffed wrist and ankle.  Dragged across a cement tarmac.   A black caged van.  A corporation’s private security detail.  The madness continues as these two wait behind a dozen locked doors for the nightmare to end.

References:

(1998) Human Rights Act: Office of the Public Sector Information. Code 42. Section 1(3).

AYNSLEY-GREEN, A. (2005) An Announced Visit to Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre. The Office of Children’s Commissioner.

BEVANGER, L. (2002) Fighting immigration ‘a waste of time’. BBC News, Business.

DAVIS, R. (2007) Mary Smith.  The New Internationalist.

EMILY DUGAN, R. V., CHRIS GREEN (2007) Two pictures of the UK’s brutal asylum policy. The Independent. First Edition ed. London.

HOME OFFICE (2006) Fair, effective, transparent and trusted. Rebuilding confidence in our immigration system. Executive Summary. IND.

JABBAR, A. (2007) Annual Report: 2006-2007. National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns.

JOHN REID, L. B. (2006) Borders, Immigration and Identity Action Plan. IN COI (Ed.), Home Office.

JOHNSTON PRESS PLC (2007) Children suffering ‘oppressive’ confinement. Bedford Today. Bedford.

JOINT COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RIGHTS (2007) The Treatment of Asylum Seekers. House of Lords, House of Commons.

MARTIN, J. (2006) Happy Touchy Feely and Driven by Good. The Guardian. Final ed. London.

RESEARCH & INFORMATION UNIT (2006) Home Office Country Assessments: An Analysis. IN CARVER, N. (Ed.), Immigration Advisory Service.

SMITH, L. (2006) G2: Everything in my life has crumbled. The Guardian. Final Edition ed. London.

VERKAIK, R. (2007) Deportation abuses ’should be investigated’. The Independent. First Edition ed. London.