Foreign, elderly, frail and suffering from dementia? The Home Office, and its privatised “detention estate”, has the solution for you: handcuffs.
According to today’s Guardian, chief inspector of prisons Nick Hardwick says that the regime at Harmondsworth immigration detention centre (IDC) is guilty of a “shocking loss of humanity” in their treatment of detainees. On at least two occasions staff
“needlessly handcuffed elderly, vulnerable and incapacitated detainees in what he called “an excessive and shocking manner”. He said that the two men were so ill that one died shortly after his handcuffs were removed and the other, the 84-year-old, who has been named as Alois Dvorzac, died while still restrained.”
The first man remained handcuffed in hospital while sedated and undergoing an operation. Mr Dvorzac died while still in handcuffs. They were taken off only after his heart had stopped.
Handcuffing happens regularly because of “a lack of intelligent individual risk assessment”. In fact it looks like the default position when even a detainee classified as “low-risk” has to be escorted outside the centre, e.g. to hospital. (“Low-risk”, by the way, means “not likely to try to escape”.) Hardwick gives the example of a case where “a detainee who was using a wheelchair following a stroke had been handcuffed on a journey to hospital for no obvious reason”.
I note that the Home Office professional standards unit has completed a critical investigation report into this particular case.
I also note that the prisons and probation ombudsman is investigating Mr Dvorzac’s death.
I note that immigration minister Mark Harper says: “The use of restraint in this case seems completely unjustified and must not be repeated. Clear instructions have been issued making clear that restraint should only happen where absolutely necessary.”
But I take little comfort from these “investigations” or from this statement. Indeed, I almost despair, because the abuse has been going on for far too long, investigations and pious ministerial press releases have consumed large tracts of forest land, but on and on it goes. In my research into the treatment of asylum seekers in the UK and France I wrote the following:
“Since the mid-1990s there have been protests by detainees against their detention, their conditions and the treatment they have received. At Campsfield House in 2001, detainees went on hunger strike, complaining that they were being treated like prisoners when they had done nothing wrong. Much of Yarl’s Wood IRC was destroyed by fire in 2002 during protests, partly over the handcuffing of a female detainee on her way to medical treatment. Protests, hunger strikes, even riots continue to take place across the ‘detention estate’: BID’s written evidence to the Parliamentary Joint Committee (BID = Bail for Immigration Detainees) reported that
‘there has been an increasing incidence of hunger strikes in the detention centres. In BID’s experience, prior to 2006, there would be one or two hunger strikes a year in one or two detention centres. Since January 2006, there have been hunger strikes in Colnbrook, Haslar and Yarl’s Wood. In April 2006, 100 people were involved in a hunger strike in Colnbrook and in July and August 2006, the parents of children held at Yarl’s Wood undertook a hunger strike.’
“Self-harm and suicide are also responses to detention. BID told the Joint Committee that
‘in April 2006, 187 people were kept under surveillance in case they harmed themselves; 19 of those people required medical treatment. From April 2005 to March 2006, 231 people self-harmed and needed medical treatment; 1,086 were put on self-harm watch. Suicide verdicts have been recorded for two people in immigration detention and a further five inquests are to be heard into deaths over the last two years in detention centres.’
“The National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCADC)[1] obtained figures under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which told them that
‘there were 48 incidents of Self-Harm requiring medical treatment in Jan/Feb/Mar 2008 [and] this is an increase of 54% on the last quarter of 2007 … during which time there were 31 incidents … 361 individuals were put on Formal Self-Harm at Risk in Jan/Feb/Mar 2008, a 28% increase on the last quarter of 2007 … during which time there were 282 incidents.’
“Such responses to detention for deportation is not surprising. Asylum seekers’ fears of returning to their home countries are real. When asked if he thought he would be deported, S1 said simply:
‘No … if one day I knew they going to send me back I will kill myself [gesture across throat] before they send me back … [I know] when I go back I get shoot very easy … I don’t want to be like that again.’[2]
“Some detainees self-harm or attempt suicide when being deported. Security guards showed the BBC’s undercover reporter in the escort service at Heathrow airport an album of photographs of the inside of a van covered in a detainee’s blood. In the light of the Home Office’s presumptions of guilt, the poor decision-making at all levels and the lack of interest in monitoring returns, there can be no confidence that the decision to refuse and return is necessarily a safe one. In these circumstances, an assumption of risk may be better than an assumption of guilt. Indeed, if assumptions of guilt and the focus on immigration control were abandoned and, instead, Refugee Convention and human rights obligations were put at the forefront of the asylum process, with improvements made in decision-making to match those changes, the practice of detention for removal would be rarely needed. Certainly, a fairer process at the outset would mean fewer people at the final stage who were fearful of return. If the process is unfair and prejudicial from the start, however, the outcome will continue to be resistance at the end.”
I have started a petition to the Home Secretary. Please sign it:
Read the Guardian article here: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/16/harmondsworth-elderly-man-died-handcuffs?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2
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