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 NCADC News Service
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Harmondsworth & Colnbrook IRCs must close.
On the 19th January 2006 a vigil was held outside Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre in memory of Bereket Yohannes, a 26-year-old Eritrean man facing deportation who was found hanged there earlier that month.
Those assembled decided that after 12 deaths in immigration detention through self harm (3 in Harmondsworth, I in Colnbrook), it was of urgent necessity to start a campaign to close all the detention centres around Heathrow; Harmondsworth and Colnbrook Removal Centres and the Queen's Building Holding Centre.  The meeting on Sunday will the first of many to create a broad alliance of groups and individuals interested in forming the campaign.

NCADC receives calls from detainees at Colnbrook and Harmondsworth every day, many claiming to have been abused - assaults during removal attempts, lack of medical care, denial of medication, access to independent doctors, and obstruction in trying to handle their legal matters -e.g. interference with post and blocked access to phone.  There has been a notable increase in alleged assaults in this last week alone.

Allegations of a Ugandan woman being reduced to a state of mental collapse during seven months in Yarl's Wood has triggered an inquiry by the HM Prisons Inspector's team into healthcare provision of detainees there following the catalogue of suicides and alleged mistreatment in detention centres.

Disturbingly, even at the very time the HM Prisons Inspector's team is actually at Yarl's Wood this week, there seems to be no let up whatsoever in the volume of calls we are getting from Yarl's Wood detainees, claiming they have been injured or subjected to medical neglect.  Some of these detainees are being identified to the HM Prisons Inspector's team.

The rate of allegations flooding in has not decreased since NCADC and others published "The use of unlawful force against immigration detainees" (see below) last year in the wake of the BBC Detention Undercover programme exposed abuse at Oakington Immigration Removal Centre.

Conditions in detention are not changing, so we are not surprised by the recent suicides and neither should the Home Office be.  Why would a "bogus" asylum seekers commit suicide rather than be deported if it wasn't through fearing of possible detention, torture and death back home?  In fact, the Home Office should expect and be ready to account for more deaths - their October 2005 statistics for their Fast-Track asylum determination process at Harmondsworth reveal a 99.6% refusal rate, including cases from DR Congo, Iran and Myanmar.  Amnesty International described Fast Track as a "faster denial of justice".

Activists in London had done a brilliant job in getting more people in to visit and campaign for individual detainees.  It is also vital to have a sustained campaign against the removal centres, the private profit making companies that run them, and the Home Office from whom their contracts are issued.


All welcome, bring your ideas !