Australia’s detention regime sets out to make asylum seekers suffer, says chief immigration psychiatrist

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adolescents, asylum seekers, Australia, Children, detainees, detention, doctors, harm, mental health issues, policy, shame, suffering, suicidal, Torture

Australia’s detention regime sets out to make asylum seekers suffer, says chief immigration psychiatrist

The chief psychiatrist responsible for the care of asylum seekers in detention for the past three years has accused the immigration department of deliberately inflicting harm on vulnerable people, harm that cannot be remedied by medical care.

“We have here an environment that is inherently toxic,” Dr Peter Young told Guardian Australia. “It has characteristics which over time reliably cause harm to people’s mental health. We have very clear evidence that that’s the case.”

Young is the most senior figure ever to condemn the detention system from within. Until a month ago he was director of mental health for International Health and Medical Services (IHMS), the private contractor that provides medical care to detention centres on the Australian mainland, Christmas Island, Nauru and Manus Island.

Young has extensively briefed Guardian Australia about a system he says is deliberately harsh, breaks people’s health, costs a fortune, compromises the ethics of doctors and is intended to place asylum seekers under “strong coercive pressure” to abandon plans to live in Australia. “Suffering is the way that is achieved.”

He believes this process is akin to torture: “If we take the definition of torture to be the deliberate harming of people in order to coerce them into a desired outcome, I think it does fulfil that definition.”

Young strongly criticised the immigration department for:

• Delays that endanger health in bringing patients to Australia from Manus and Nauru: “It is seen as undesirable because it undermines the idea that people are never going to Australia and also because of the concern that if people arrive onshore then they may have access to legal counsel and other assistance.”

• Leaving people in detention who are acutely suicidal: “Trying to manage them in a non-therapeutic setting like that is just inherently futile. It’s not going to work.”

• Returning patients with less severe problems to detention despite medical advice that they cannot be expected “to fully respond to treatment in an environment that was making them sick”.

• Misusing patient information. “People disclose a lot of personal information which is then recorded in notes which are then available to non-medical people for other purposes.” Young says the dual role of IHMS staff treating detainees but reporting to the department raises fundamental ethical problems for doctors in the system.

• Displaying an obsession with secrecy: “Speaking out of turn is clamped down on whenever it occurs … they continue to maintain the fantasy that they can keep everything a secret.”

• Reluctance to gather and use mental health statistics that might “result in controversy or threaten the application of the policies of deterrence”.

• Directing doctors not to put in writing that detention has led to deterioration in their patients’ mental health. IHMS doctors ignored the direction. Young said they saw evidence all around them of detainees “sick because they are there and getting sicker while they remain there”.

The Manus camp particularly appalled Young. “When you go to Manus Island and you walk down what is called the ‘walk of shame’ between the compounds and you see the men there at the fences it’s an awful experience,” he says.

“You have to feel shame. You have to understand what that feeling is about in order to be able to be compassionate. By feeling the shame you stay on the right side of the line.”

Young told Guardian Australia IHMS figures had shown for some time that a third of adults and children in the detention system had what he called “a significant-level disorder”. If they were living in Australia, that would require the care of specialist medical health services. The figures only got worse as detainees stayed longer in detention: “After a year it approaches 50%.”

Last week, in alarming evidence to an Australian Human Rights Commission inquiry, Young said the immigration department had refused to accept IHMS statistics proving damage to children and adolescents held in prolonged detention. He told the inquiry: “The department reacted with alarm and asked us to withdraw the figures.”

In a belligerent appearance before the inquiry, the secretary of the immigration department, Martin Bowles, accused the president of the Human Rights Commission, Gillian Triggs, of making “highly emotive claims” about health problems in the detention system. He had not heard evidence of the problems provided by Young and other IHMS doctors earlier in the day.

His hand shook as he confronted Triggs. When his evidence produced laughter he demanded the room be silenced. He refused to answer some questions and retreated at times behind a wall of bureaucratic prose.

But Bowles did not deny a link between prolonged detention and mental illness. He called this a “well-established” issue and insisted his department was doing “everything it humanly can” to provide “appropriate medical care” to address the mental health problems of detainees.

Young told Guardian Australia that was impossible: “The problem is the system.”

Young is confident that in his time at IMHS the men and women working for him made better assessments of detainees’ health and delivered much better treatment than in the past.

“But you can’t mitigate the harm, because the system is designed to create a negative mental state. It’s designed to produce suffering. If you suffer, then it’s punishment. If you suffer, you’re more likely to agree to go back to where you came from. By reducing the suffering you’re reducing the functioning of the system and the system doesn’t want you to do that.

“Everybody knows that the harm is being caused and the system carries on. Everybody accepts that this is the policy and the policy cannot change. And everybody accepts that the only thing you can do is work within the parameters of the policy.”

The window of reasonableness closes
Young arrived in the system in 2011 at a crucial moment: the high court was about to knock back the Gillard government’s proposed “Malaysia solution” and, as the boats arrived in ever-increasing numbers, the detention system was bursting at the seams. So the government began processing detainees quickly and releasing large numbers into the community on bridging visas. “The problems that we were seeing from a mental health perspective decreased massively.”

Young has been a psychiatrist for nearly 20 years, most of that time working in public health. He joined IHMS believing the detention system was problematic but confident that good could be done from the inside. “I felt that given the experience I had I could work between the immigration department and IHMS and the detention health advisory group to bring about positive change.”

The year before Young’s arrival, the immigration department had been put on notice once again that prolonged detention harms mental health. Professor Kathy Eager of Wollongong University reached that conclusion in a study commissioned by the department itself.

“There is,” she wrote, “almost universal criticism of the policy of detaining asylum seekers, particularly in terms of the mental health implications.”

Her findings were backed by the department’s independent Detention Health Advisory Group (Dehag), the Australian College of Mental Health Nurses and the Australian Psychological Society. In 2011 the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists declared: “Prolonged detention, particularly in isolated locations, with poor access to health and social services and uncertainty of asylum seeker claims, can have severe and detrimental effects.”

While detainees were being rapidly released, Young observed attitudes towards them improved throughout the system. They were not treated as prisoners.

Their mental health was generally good: “These people are actually quite robust and psychologically healthy individuals despite all the suffering that they have been through.”

But what Young calls “the window of reasonableness” stayed open for only six months. With boats arriving in unprecedented numbers and the opposition in full cry, the government reversed direction. Once again boat people were to be held for long periods. The camps on Manus and Nauru were reopened. Kevin Rudd announced that no new boat arrivals would end up living in Australia.

“You just can’t overstate how things changed so rapidly when the policy changed,” Young says. Once again the system treated them as prisoners. The impact on their mental health was as predicted: fine for a few months, then increased depression, anxiety and stress.

“Most people have a level of resilience which allows them to function fairly well for a few months, but after that time there is a steady deterioration … after six months the cumulative harms accelerate very rapidly.”

Asylum seekers self-harming is ‘seen as bad behaviour’.
Uncertainty does the worst damage, Young says. Then comes hopelessness. “They are constantly given a message that they are on a negative pathway, meaning their claim is not going to be accepted. This is despite what we know about the outcomes of processing in the long term, which is that greater than 80% of people are found to be genuine refugees.”

And they have so little autonomy. “Just the day-to-day daily lives that they experience living in the detention system means that they have very little control over what they do. It makes things particularly difficult for people who are there with their children as well. Their capacity to act as parents and to make decisions on behalf of their families is so restricted.”

Young sees immigration detention as inherently more harmful than prison. “In prison those with mental health problems generally improve. People are more well on their release than when they entered. What we see in detention is the opposite of that. Over the course of time in detention, they get sicker.

“We don’t have families in prisons. Secondly, when people go to prison they go through a recognised independent judicial process. It’s not arbitrary. This is an arbitrary process and people see it as being unfair and that is another factor.

“Also, when people are in prison they have a definitive sentence so they know there is an end point. This is not like that at all. This is indefinite.”

Each quarter IHMS presents the department with figures on the health of detainees. The data for July to September 2013 showed a third of those held in detention for more than a year were experiencing extremely severe depression; 42% were suffering extremely severe anxiety; and 42% were extremely stressed. The report notes these figures are consistent with internationally published research: “The pattern shows the negative mental health effects of immigration detention with a clear deterioration of mental health indices over time in detention.”

Abbott takes power
“People didn’t really take Rudd seriously,” Young recalls. “But everybody was saying when the Libs get in it’s really going to get tough. So there was a building up of expectation that things were going to get worse, which made it worse in itself.”

When the change came in late 2013, there was no radical shift in policy. “Everything just got harsher.”

Relations between the department and its independent health advisers were already rocky. Dehag had been set up in 2006 at a time of acute embarrassment after it was discovered that a schizophrenic Australian resident, Cornelia Rau, was being held in the detention.

She was thought to be German, was desperately ill and the immigration department refused to release her for treatment. She was finally identified naked in the yards of the Baxter detention centre.

Dehag had an independence the department came to regret. Its dozen members were nominated by peak medical authorities, including the Australian Medical Association, the Mental Health Council of Australia and the professional colleges for nursing, general practitioners and psychiatry. The experts were at the table but the department found itself dealing with people who could neither be corralled nor muzzled.

“It’s always been a very tense relationship,” says Louise Newman, director of the centre for developmental psychiatry and psychology at Monash University. Newman chaired the group for a time. “At every meeting until they disbanded us we would make a statement that we did not support mandatory detention or prolonged detention of any form, that it was damaging and that it created problems that we could not fix.”

Young, who sat in on the group’s meetings, confirmed the experts’ fundamental objection to detention: “That’s been the baseline position that they have always held and they have always presented.”

The group watched with concern as the Gillard government reversed its policy of swift release for asylum seekers. Newman sees the second round of detention as worse than the first because it came as the evidence of harm was even more firmly established. “They replicated the very conditions that they have admitted contribute to mental harm and deterioration,” she said.

“It’s seen as collateral damage. The department does what it can to reduce it but in the name of the greater good of border protection and deterrents it doesn’t really matter. We’re saving lives by sending people mad.”

The group drove change. “The department was very pleased to use things that we brought in, so any positive reforms that have gone on in the system in terms of screening people and healthcare and health standards were all done by Dehag.”

But Newman alleges the department later sabotaged medical screening of asylum seekers for signs of torture and trauma. “We argued that no one who had been tortured should be detained or particularly not in remote places. The departmental doctors decided the best way to get around that was not to do the screening, so they didn’t find out who was tortured. They stopped it on Christmas Island so people could be shipped away before it was even known if they were trauma survivors.”

Tension between Dehag and the department intensified after Bowles was appointed secretary of the department in 2012, Newman says. Bowles is not a doctor but for much of his career was a health administrator before joining the defence department. He is one of a group of former army and defence figures who now hold the most senior positions in the immigration department.

Bowles announced a review of Dehag, which he renamed the Immigration Health Advisory Group (Ihag). He failed in manoeuvres to change its membership but imposed a former military doctor, Paul Alexander, as its chairman. “It was meant to be a much more controlled group,” Newman says.

Bowles wanted the experts to withdraw from public debate. Young says: “They wanted the thing to be more watertight.” The experts were not accused of leaking. “But they expressed views in public which were relevant to the business before the committee.” They continued to do so. The most vocal was Newman.

The experts and the department continued to be at loggerheads over the standard of care for detainees. Newman says Dehag and Ihag always argued that detainees had to be looked after “regardless of visa status” while they were in Australian hands, and it was an ethical obligation on all medical practitioners working in the system to provide care to Australian standards.

But once Nauru and Manus reopened, the department began to demand treatment be pegged to the much lower standards of care on those islands. There would have to be exceptions – no inpatient mental healthcare is available on Manus or Nauru – but the department’s wish was to lower the general standard of care for detainees in those camps.

At what was to be the last meeting of Ihag in August 2013, the issue was debated at length. An impasse was reached, says Newman. “The department at a very high level from secretary down argues the Australian government is not obliged to provide our standard of care to these people.”

But experts insisted that standards must be maintained and that the department’s plan was an ethical minefield for doctors. “Clinicians who go along with it are absolutely compromised,” says Newman.

Ihag experts continued to work in the system, but they never met as a group after Abbott’s victory in the federal election of September 2013. A long pattern of suddenly cancelled meetings ended with no meetings called at all. In mid-December the experts received letters thanking them for their service. They were dismissed. Alexander was now to be the sole adviser on medical matters to the renamed Department of Immigration and Border Protection.

Scott Morrison, the new minister, issued a statement: “The large membership of the group made it increasingly challenging to provide balanced, consistent and timely advice in a fast-moving policy and operational environment.”

Young says: “That doesn’t wash at all. Ihag had consistently told the department things it didn’t want to hear and the department had pretty transparently sabotaged the operation of it for more than 12 months.”

The chiefs of peak medical bodies, including the AMA’s Dr Steve Hambleton, expressed shock at Ihag’s demise. Abbott condemned the generally negative reporting of the move as “a complete beatup by the ABC and some of the Fairfax papers”. The prime minister declared: “This was a committee which was not very effectual.”

The rising tide of data
Morrison had been in the job only a few months when he assured Australia that mental health problems among detainees were on the wane. In mid-December, Nine News reported: “Immigration minister Scott Morrison yesterday said diagnosed mental health problems among detainees in Australia had fallen from a peak of 12% in 2011 to the current rate of 3.4% as a result of greater resourcing.”

Young is scathing about Morrison’s figures. “That’s not a prevalence rate. It never has been. It’s a pale shadow of what the real prevalence rate is because of the way that data is derived.”

Young says Morrison was ignoring the figures revealed by regular screening and instead using a count of visits to GPs or psychiatrists where mental health problems were raised. “It doesn’t take into account people who may have a disorder who are not seeing either of those two categories of clinicians.”

Gathering better statistics was one of Young’s key ambitions in his time at IHMS. The department dragged its feet on his proposals to use new measures to screen mental health problems. “There seemed to be a fear that it would result in controversy or threaten the application of the policies of deterrence,” Young says.

But the chief psychiatrist finally got his way and the new measures were used for the first time in the first quarter of this year. Young presented these figures to the Royal College of Australian and New Zealand Psychiatrists in May. They confirmed the long-established pattern: about a third of all those in detention had clinically significant problems – and the longer the detention, the worse the problems.

Half those who had been detained for 19 months or more were extremely or severely depressed; 40% were extremely or severely stressed; and 40% were extremely or severely anxious. The worst scores were gathered on Manus and Nauru. But the figures show a common pattern across the whole detention system.

In a PowerPoint presentation provided to Guardian Australia by the college, Young concludes: “All show linear deterioration in mental health status over time in detention.”

Young’s staff were also collecting figures on the impact of detention on children. “Changing to instruments more appropriate for children has been something the department has dragged their feet on for quite a long time.”

Young shocked the Human Rights Commission inquiry last week by alleging the department refused to accept these Honosca (Health of the Nation Outcome Scales for Children and Adolescents) figures.

He told Guardian Australia: “This is not the only instance where data which has been seen as controversial or just difficult to understand has been buried.”

But Triggs requested the figures be given to her inquiry. They show across the mainland detention system a large number of children showing emotional distress or related symptoms. Young considered the figures a sign of serious problems that needed urgent consideration and action. Some of these children are those that IHMS doctors reported as showing issues of self-harm, regression, aggression, bed-wetting and despair.

The Health of the Nation Outcome Scales for Children and Adolescents figures
When Bowles was questioned at the inquiry, he did not deny his department issued instructions to IHMS to withdraw the figures but was at pains to suggest to the commission that they remained under consideration by the department. He said: “I have no doubt that most of this sort of reporting is mainstream.”

Giving evidence to Triggs’s inquiry was Young’s last assignment for IHMS. As his three years with the commercial providers drew to a close, he decided to make a professional and public assessment of the detention system once he was free to do so.

“As a medical practitioner your duty is always to your patients and the people you look after,” he says. “To them you have a broader moral and ethical responsibility. In this case you see harm being done and as the primary duty of a doctor is to do no harm, your duty is to speak out against that harm – to say that harm should not be done.”

One Sri Lankan Tamil’s testimony: beaten, branded, suffocated and raped

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asylum seekers, men, rape, sexual abuse, Torture

One Sri Lankan Tamil’s testimony: beaten, branded, suffocated and raped

Siva, a Tamil from Sri Lanka, is facing deportation from the UK for the second time in two years. The last time he fought the journey every inch of the way.

“They loaded me on the plane first, right at the back, because I was making a lot of noise, screaming. I was very scared and begged them not to send me back but they said if I didn’t go quietly, they would handcuff me and force me to go,” he told the Guardian.

Given his account of what he had lived through in his home country, his panic is unsurprising. Since the brutal end to the Sri Lankan civil war five years ago, human rights groups have accused the government in Colombo of routinely abducting and torturing Tamils it suspects of sympathies with the defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) insurgency.

Rape and sexual abuse of men and women is a factor in two-thirds of the cases studied by Freedom from Torture, the British advocacy group.

Siva was detained in a police station, tortured and forced to perform oral sex on his guards over a period of five weeks. He only escaped after his family paid a bribe. But, when he finally arrived in the UK, the Home Office did not believe his account. He was deported in 2012 after exhausting his appeals.

“I was confused and frightened. I couldn’t sleep and was on sleeping pills. At first I thought I’d get a last-minute reprieve because twice before I’d been taken to the airport to be deported but not been sent.

“This time I realised it was going to happen when three people surrounded me and escorted me on to the plane and stayed there till it started to move. After takeoff I just sat there and didn’t speak to anyone because I was too scared.”

When he arrived at Colombo airport, he was interrogated by police for five hours, but they did not appear to be aware he had been in detention before and had claimed asylum. He was allowed to go, but soon the police came looking for him, forcing to him to flee and hide with friends in the tea plantations, never venturing outdoors. It was attending his sister’s wedding in Colombo that was his undoing.

Police officers came for him on the second evening, arrest warrant in hand, claiming he had helped channel money to the LTTE when he’d worked in a shop in Colombo five years earlier and was now trying to reorganise a terrorist organisation.

“I don’t know how to describe what went through my head at that moment; I was very scared. I cried and shouted but they handcuffed and blindfolded me and put a gag in my mouth to silence me. They started hitting me even inside the vehicle and put a gun to my head because they were angry that I’d hid from them. I knew I was going to be tortured again.”

It started that first night at the police station in Colombo, with kicking, punching, slapping and beating with blunt instruments. Siva was hung upside down by his feet, his hands tied behind his back, and his head submerged in a barrel of water.

He was suffocated by having a plastic bag soaked in petrol tied over his head. He was, branded on several occasions with a hot metal rod, leaving 11 visible scars on his back, and burned with cigarettes leaving at least 17 visible scars.

An expert independent medical report subsequently obtained in the UK confirms Siva’s scars are consistent with his account of torture. He also has the arrest warrant and court documents renewing his detention to prove he was indeed held in custody.

He was also repeatedly raped. “Even at night they didn’t allow us to sleep; they sexually tortured us. I was raped by different men and sometimes other men watched. They were not wearing uniform and they were drunk. They called me ‘Tamil slave’ and ‘son of a bitch’.”

Ten months later, Siva’s family again paid a bribe for his release, though the official police records say he escaped. Siva took a boat to India and then made his way back to the UK, arriving this year. When he went to the Home Office to apply for asylum again, he says he wasn’t eligible because he had already been deported. Now he has to sign in at a police station monthly but every time he fears he could be detained again and deported.

In Sri Lanka, his parents also have to report to the police; as soon as Siva fled the island, his father and brother were detained. He doesn’t know if they have been mistreated because they have never talked about it.

“If I am deported for a second time, I won’t go; I’d rather die here. Because of the immigration people here I suffered more; they didn’t take the right decision and because of them I was detained for months and suffered physical and mental torture.”

Asked what he felt about the global summit on preventing sexual violence being held in London Docklands, a few miles from where he is staying, he said: “I feel like the British government has double standards hosting this summit; they are showing two different faces to the world.”

On the front lines: Documenting evidence of rape is a fraught task

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accountability, army personnel, asylum seekers, conflict, disclosure, evidence, humiliation, impunity, medical care, perpetrators, police, psychological services, rape, sexual assault, Sexual Violence, shame, survivors, testimony, Torture, trauma

On the front lines: Documenting evidence of rape is a fraught task

In my line of work it’s impossible not to notice the chilling impact rape has on its victims. The shame and humiliation they are made to feel means disclosure can be very difficult, even in a ‘safe’ setting such as a doctor’s examination room.

Taking statements and documenting evidence of rape for use in legal proceedings is not easy – it requires skill and experience to gather all of the required information from a survivor of such a terrible crime while respecting their rights, supporting their health care needs, ensuring their safety, their confidentiality and minimizing further traumatization. Giving this kind of harrowing testimony often comes at a personal cost to the survivor, and their courage never fails to astound me.

In the UK it is estimated that almost 90 per cent of victims of serious sexual assault never disclose it to the police, and around 38 per cent tell no one (at the time of the crime.) Yet, in the UK we have support available for survivors of sexual violence and a comparatively open society that generally supports the victim and does not stigmatise them.

Imagine then, how hard it is to disclose rape in a place like the Democratic Republic of Congo where the perpetrators of such crimes are often the police and army personnel – the very officials charged with the protection of civilians.

A new report by Freedom from Torture reveals the routine use rape, gang rape and multiple rape to torture politically active women in official state detention centres in the country. The levels of impunity enjoyed by those who commit these crimes is breathtaking and it is this lack of accountability that the Global Summit aims to address.

The Protocol on Investigation and Prevention of Sexual violence in Conflict which will be launched by Angelina Jolie and William Hague at the Global Summit on Wednesday and will set out best practice for obtaining witness testimony of crimes of sexual violence in conflict.

It will ensure that the evidence collected is of a standard that can be used in international criminal courts to charge not just those who committed the crimes directly but also their commanding officers. Though work still needs to be done to get this document right, and to resource evidence collection, it is a very welcome step towards holding perpetrators to account both nationally and internationally.

My big concern is that while so much noise is being made about the protection of survivors of sexual violence in conflict at the Global Summit, the Home Office remains out of step.

Every week I see survivors of persecutory rape who have fled their countries and are seeking protection in the UK from the horrors that have been inflicted on them and their families. Sadly their experiences as asylum seekers rarely afford them the dignity, security and peace they need in order to be able to disclose sexual violence.

Repeated interrogation by Home Office officials about what they have been through – all too often conducted from a clear standpoint of officials’ disbelief inadequate welfare support and difficulties in accessing the medical care and psychological services they so desperately need all serve to compound their trauma.

Protection through asylum is a key element in the fight to end sexual violence and support survivors of these crimes. Accordingly, it should be at the forefront of this week’s discussions.

When maternity doesn’t matter Dispersing pregnant women seeking asylum briefing

A report by the Refugee Council and Maternity Action

When maternity doesn’t matter: Dispersing pregnant women seeking asylum briefing

Refugees ‘are forced into destitution’ in Britain because they cannot be sent back

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asylum seekers, destitution, exploitation, forcibly returned, rape, violence

Refugees ‘are forced into destitution’ in Britain because they cannot be sent back

Thousands of people who have fled some of the world’s most dangerous countries are being forced into destitution, begging and prostitution on British streets because they cannot be sent back, the Home Office is warned today.

A large majority of refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe are refused asylum, but very few are forcibly returned because their home countries will not accept them or because immigration officers lose track of them.

In a bleak report, the Refugee Council says nearly 25 per cent of failed asylum-seekers who approached it for emergency help over the last two years were from those five countries.

Most do not qualify for state support or housing once their asylum applications have been rejected unless they can demonstrate they are planning to leave.

But the charity says many are too frightened to return because of the grim human rights situations in their homelands and end up living in the shadows in Britain.

“This can force people into street homelessness, begging and sex work. Women who are destitute are particularly exposed to the risk of further violence or exploitation in the UK,” it warns.

“In our experience of working with women in the asylum system, many will have faced violence in their own country or during their flight to safety.

“Arrival in the UK should signal safety but when women’s claims for asylum are refused and they are made destitute, they continue to be exposed to the risk of further violence or exploitation in the UK.”

Others rely on family, friends and charity for help or work illegally in the hidden economy to raise enough money for food and shelter.

“They fear returning so much that many take the difficult decision to stay in the UK, often making huge personal sacrifices in doing so,” the report says.

“Having exhausted their appeal rights, refused asylum seekers usually have no access to financial support or accommodation, and are left living in destitution and without access to basic services.

“This includes pregnant women, for whom destitution is particularly serious given the health implications for themselves and the future health of their children.”

In the report, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, published to mark Human Rights Day today, the Refugee Council urges the Government to offer rejected asylum-seekers from such nations a special form of protection until their home countries are considered safe for their return.

To underline the point, it says women and girls face mass rape and sexual violence from the army, police and militia groups in the DRC, opponents of Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party in Zimbabwe risk murder and torture, while civilians in Somalia suffer indiscriminate attacks both by government forces and insurgent militias.

Lisa Doyle, the Refugee Council’s advocacy manager, said: “For many people, the horrifying situations that caused them to flee their countries in the first place very much remain a reality. It is no wonder many people fear returning and make the difficult decision to stay here, far from family and with few rights.”

“To be here five years without doing anything is very depressing”

Nyasha’s family has paid a heavy price for its involvement in the opposition MDC in Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe’s supporters killed her brother, badly beat up her elderly father and raped her.

Leaving two sons behind, she claimed asylum in 2007. She was refused permission to stay the following year and further application was turned down in 2010.

The only accommodation she was offered was more than 200 miles away from London where she had been living. Now she shares a cramped flat with her grown-up daughter who has a child of her own.

Nyasha* says: “I don’t have anything and have to rely on my daughter. It’s a very difficult situation. Money is a real problem.

“I’m always sick – I’m on tablets for high blood pressure. To be here five years without doing anything is very depressing.

“When I think about it I feel like crying. But my position is a bit better than other people because I have my daughter. But other people are really, really suffering – some rely on friends and live in churches.”

*Nyasha’s is a pseudonym

Immigraton Officials ‘Too Dismissive’ Of Detainee Torture Claims

Immigraton Officials ‘Too Dismissive’ Of Detainee Torture Claims

Officials at an immigration removal centre were too dismissive of reports from detainees claiming to be victims of torture, inspectors have said.

The so-called Rule 35 reports at Dover immigration removal centre in Kent were poor, “often hand-written and difficult to read and did not contain photographs or body maps”, the Chief Inspector of Prisons Nick Hardwick said.

“Cases involving torture described scarring but lacked photographs or body maps,” he said.

“There were no judgments on whether scarring was consistent with the alleged method of abuse. For example, in a case where the detainee claimed to have been shot, there was no judgment on whether the scars were consistent with gunshot wounds.”

Calling for the troubled UK Border Agency (UKBA) to urgently improve its response to such claims, Mr Hardwick said the replies were “dismissive and none had led to the release of a detainee”.

“In one case, despite a report by a health care professional which described scarring, the reply stated: ‘There is no medical evidence to support your contentions…

“‘Were it even vaguely credible that you were ill-treated in the manner described, it is considered that you would have raised this at the earliest opportunity.'”

Overall, the inspectors found the centre had improved in April since it was last inspected in May last year.

But Mr Hardwick added: “The two key areas that still needed to be addressed were the poor quality of information provided by UKBA to detainees and the lack of adequate support to help detainees prepare for release or removal.”

Keith Best, chief executive of campaign group Freedom from Torture, said: “When it comes to the UKBA’s efforts to fix the chronically dysfunctional rule 35 process, HMIP’s verdict of ‘prompt but dismissive’ says it all.

“The UKBA has ploughed its energies into speeding up processing of rule 35 forms but these efforts have come to nought for survivors of torture who remain in detention because case owners dismiss the medical evidence in these reports out of hand.

“The example of the case owner flatly rejecting the possibility that someone would make a late disclosure of torture involving anal rape is sadly very typical of the cases we see on a regular basis.”

He went on: “This inspectorate has repeatedly castigated the UKBA for frustrating the operation of rule 35.

“Parliament, which created rule 35, must take further action to hold the UKBA to account and ensure rule 35 is a meaningful safeguard for torture survivors wrongly detained in these detention centres.”

Special report: Tamil asylum-seekers to be forcibly deported

Tags

deportation, forced removal, rape, Sri Lanka, Torture, trauma, war, War Crimes

Special report: Tamil asylum-seekers to be forcibly deported

Dozens of Tamil asylum-seekers will be forcibly removed from Britain on a secretive deportation flight today despite credible evidence that they face arrest and retribution on their return.

A chartered plane, PTV030, is due to take off at 15.30 from an undisclosed London airport and fly direct to Colombo. Human-rights organisations have called on the UK Border Agency to halt the flight on the grounds that Tamils who are known to be critical of the Sri Lankan government have been brutally treated following their return.

The forced removals come as Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was the architect of Sri Lanka’s final victorious push three years ago against the Tamil Tigers – a military offensive which defeated the brutal insurgency group but also led to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians – flies into the UK to join the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations.

Human Rights Watch has documented 13 credible cases over the past two years in which failed Tamil asylum-seekers from Europe have been tortured after landing in Sri Lanka, and warns that those cases are likely to be “just the tip of the iceberg”.

Mr Rajapaksa’s government has been accused of committing war crimes during the military offensive and of continuing to preside over a culture of impunity in which kidnap, extra-judicial killings and torture are still commonplace, particularly in the heavily militarised Tamil areas in the north.

The Foreign Office’s latest report on human rights describes Sri Lanka as an area of “serious concern” when it came to abuses. But that has not stopped the UK Border Agency, which is under political pressure from the Government to ramp up deportations, from forcibly removing hundreds of Tamils in recent months.

The agency is notoriously secretive when it comes to forcible removals, rarely announcing them until the very last minute and providing few details about who is on board.

There have been at least four chartered planes in the last six months delivering Tamils back to Sri Lanka.

Some of those on board today’s flight include people who have overstayed their visa and immigrants who have been convicted of a criminal offence. But it also contains dozens of ethnic Tamils who have had asylum bids turned down and are at risk of political persecution.

The Independent yesterday spoke to one Tamil man in his mid-twenties who is currently being held in Yarl’s Wood detention centre and is due to be on today’s flight. He said there were six people on his wing who were failed asylum-seekers who thought they would be at risk of torture or worse if they were returned. “Everybody is crying,” he said. “We all know about cases where people have been tortured or killed after they were returned. Why is the UK government doing this?”

The man, who requested his identity remain anonymous for fear of reprisals if he is removed, said he travelled from Jaffna to Britain in 2006 to escape the violence that had plagued northern Sri Lanka for three decades. He added that both he and some of his fellow deportees played prominent roles in recent protests in London against the Sri Lankan government.

“Whenever there were demonstrations the Sri Lankans would send people down to photograph the protesters,” he said. “They know exactly who we are. That’s what scares us.”

The UK Government insists that those who are forcibly removed are individually assessed to make sure that they are not at risk of torture on their return. But Human Rights Watch says they have at least three cases of Tamils who had been forcibly removed from the UK and subsequently tortured.

“There are likely to be many more cases, because these are the people who have managed to find their way from Sri Lanka to the UK, and that we have managed to interview,” said David Mepham, director of HRW UK.

“The UK should suspend the forcible removal of Tamil asylum-seekers pending a review of its processes for assessing asylum claims by Tamils.”

A UK Border Agency spokesman said: “The UK has a proud record of offering sanctuary to those who need it, but people who do not have a genuine need for our protection must return to their home country.

“We only undertake returns to Sri Lanka when we are satisfied that the individual has no international protection needs. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled not all Tamil asylum-seekers require protection.”

Tamil returnees are raped, whipped and burned

Suthan knows all too well how hollow assurances that Tamils deported back to Sri Lanka are safe can be. He first fled to the UK five years ago after the Sri Lankan Terrorist Investigations Department accused him of having links to the Tamil Tigers.

During his asylum application he presented medical evidence showing that he had been beaten with sticks and burned with cigarettes but his request was turned down.

Last year he was placed on a chartered flight and returned to Colombo. He was questioned on his arrival at the airport in the presence of an official from the British High Commission and was later released.

But the interrogations continued. After trying to return home he was picked up by security officials and claims he was tortured, including being whipped with electric flex, burned with cigarettes and having his head immersed in a bag filled with petrol.

After paying a bribe he escaped to the UK again and is now represented by Freedom from Torture, which has used medical evidence to document numerous instances of deportees being brutalised on their return to Sri Lanka.

“This situation has gone on long enough,” says Keith Best, Freedom from Torture’s chief executive. “Forcible returns of refused Tamil asylum-seekers must be halted until the UK Government is sure that they will not be delivering people into the hands of their torturers.”

Even the asylum panels have recognised that torture continues despite the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war. In late 2010 the Immigration and Asylum Chamber accepted that a Tamil woman who had been returned to Sri Lanka by the UK authorities was tortured and raped. A second 33-year-old man was also granted asylum last year after a tribunal accepted that he had been beaten and burned with hot metal sticks after his return.

Nonetheless the British Government has stepped up deportations.

Jerome Taylor

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Tamils deported to Sri Lanka from Britain being tortured, victim claims

The human spur to action on asylum

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deportation, destitute, detention, human rights abuses, persecution, rape, suicide, Torture

The human spur to action on asylum

Some clear facts and figures have been put into the public domain, thanks to a new report, Refused: the experiences of women denied asylum in the UK. In this research, 48% of women seeking asylum in Britain had been raped in their home countries. Half had experienced arrest or imprisonment. The vast majority were refused asylum in the UK. None felt able to consider returning to their home countries, as they were too scared of what would happen to them if they went back. Of those refused, more than half were made destitute – left with no means of support or housing. A quarter were detained. And the emotional impact of refusal was also revealed: more than half of women refused asylum had contemplated suicide.

These figures have received a certain amount of attention. But how urgently do figures communicate the need for change? Can you see the human faces behind the facts? This is always the problem when we talk about human rights abuses and persecution. Whether we are looking at massacres or mass rapes elsewhere, or homelessness or detention in this country, it is too easy for people to disappear behind statistics.

Campaigners are aware that we need to take our own sense of the individuality of the people we work with to a wider audience, but it often seems almost impossible to do so. In a world bludgeoned by fast, hard, visual news, how do we tell a story that makes others stop and listen?

Indeed, at a time when policy seems driven by reflecting and magnifying people’s reluctance to empathise with the most vulnerable, many people appear to almost take pride in their ability to keep the walls around their sense of wellbeing high and not to let the situation of the unemployed or the disabled or the asylum seeker knock a hole.

The problem doesn’t lie only with the indifference of some audiences; it’s also that these stories are by their very nature hard ones to tell. I co-wrote this particular report at the charity I run, Women for Refugee Women, so I know it was tough for each and every woman who participated in the research to communicate her experiences of persecution and her journey through the asylum process.

If we want to take those stories further, we are often pushing women beyond the limits of what they can bear. As one woman said to me when I asked her to talk to a journalist about her experiences of rape and torture in the Congo: “If I talk about it again I have to live it again, and again. It makes my head hurt and my heart burst. I can’t do it.” I felt ashamed of asking her to do so.

Yet it is only by communicating the individual story that we can begin to transform the rhetoric around us that condemns an asylum seeker to be seen as part of a flood rather than as an individual. I can tell you that there are fewer than 20,000 people coming to the UK to seek asylum each year, or that asylum makes up only an estimated 4% of net inward migration, but I wonder if you’d be convinced by those figures to join those campaigning for a more humane asylum process.

However, if I tell you that a woman I know called Lydia fled torture and rape in prison in Cameroon to come to this country to seek asylum, but was imprisoned here and threatened with deportation, you might let me talk to you for a bit longer. If I could bring you to meet Lydia herself, I would challenge you not to be moved by her situation.

Indeed, at the launch of the report in parliament, I saw the audience sit cool and calm through a presentation of the figures, but I saw them moved to tears when Lydia Besong got up to speak. Lydia is a writer who has fought a long – and only recently successful – public campaign for her right to be recognised as a refugee here, and the response she received made me remember why it is that, although we need the facts and the figures, it is human connection that creates the spur to action. Because it’s only if we can recognise that these women are just like you and I that we can understand the importance of building a more just asylum process in which they receive a fair hearing.

Child asylum seekers ‘still being imprisoned’ by immigration service

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age, Child asylum seekers, Children, deportation, detainees, detention, trauma

Child asylum seekers ‘still being imprisoned’ by immigration service

A report by the Refugee Council to be published this week accuses the immigration service of continuing to detain child asylum seekers by wrongly classifying them as adults.

The report, Not a Minor Offence, has been welcomed by other groups working with refugees and asylum seekers who are growing increasingly concerned by the numbers of age dispute cases. Last year one child spent almost three months locked up before it was finally accepted that he was not an adult.

Evidence that children were being psychologically damaged by their experiences in the asylum system led the government to announce an end to the controversial practice of keeping under-18s in detention centres two years ago this weekend. Yet the practice is continuing and no one knows how many children have been illegally deported as adults.

Guessing someone’s age is controversial, but the Refugee Council believes officials are not erring on the side of caution. In many cases agencies find out about a child whose age is disputed only when another detainee inside a centre reports their concerns about an unaccompanied child being locked up.

Faisal was only 15 when he arrived in the UK. Judged to be an adult, he spent several days in police cells and was left to sleep rough on the streets before finally spending a month in a detention centre.

Talking about his experience still causes him acute distress. “I was 15. I didn’t have any documents but I know my age. I didn’t understand why it was so important.

“The immigration officer was banging his fist on the table saying ‘No, this is not your age’. By the end I was so tired and upset that I said OK, I will be whatever you want me to be. When I was first in the police cell I was crying because I couldn’t believe it. They came and banged on the door and shouted at me. One policeman drew his finger across his throat. They would all say ‘You’re going back, we’ll be sending you back’ and point at me and laugh. At the detention centre they locked me in a room by myself. I didn’t know anyone. I was very scared I was to be sent back to Afghanistan. I would rather die.”

The number of unaccompanied child asylum seekers arriving in the UK is dropping – from 3,645 in 2007 to 1,277 in 2011 – but no one knows why.

Judith Dennis, advocacy officer at the Refugee Council and author of the report, admitted the detention of children on the grounds that their age was in question had not changed, but said that establishing someone’s age was not easy. “It’s a difficult task but we should be erring on the side of caution. The official guidelines for unaccompanied children state they should not be detained unless ‘their physical appearance and/or demeanour very strongly indicates that they are significantly over 18’.

“That is clearly not what’s happening. All children should be referred to a social worker so that a proper assessment can be made. It’s not something you can decide in a few minutes, and I think it’s quite worrying this is what seems to be happening in a lot of cases.

“Given that it’s well established the harm the experience of being locked up can and has caused children, and that the government has accepted it’s unacceptable to lock up children, why are we not taking this more seriously?”

Hashi Syedain, of the independent monitoring board at Harmondsworth immigration removal centre, said the problem was serious. “It bears repeating again and again – in 2012 the UK is locking up children in Harmondsworth in what is effectively an adult male prison. They can remain there for weeks on end because the system doesn’t care enough to stop it happening.

“It is true that some young people who are over 18 claim to be younger in the hope of being allowed to stay in the UK, but this does not excuse the UK Border Agency’s failure to prevent children from ending up in detention.

“Another year passes in which nothing changes and children continue to find themselves in detention. It is not good enough.”

For Faisal, the intervention of Refugee Council workers meant he is at college and living in semi-independent hostel accommodation, but the trauma of his teenage years is far from over. When he turns 18 he may still be sent back to Afghanistan. “I try to study, but it’s hard to think of the future,” he said. “I feel very hopeless. I’m scared they will come for me and put me back in detention or deport me. I cannot go back to Afghanistan. If I had not left I would have been dead. If I go back, I will die.”

Fears of upheaval as firm facing probe over asylum seeker’s death wins housing deal

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Children, destitute, detention, Torture, trauma

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/apr/17/upheaval-fears-g4s-asylum-seeker-housing

Campaigners say asylum seekers could be housed in “sub-standard, unsecure and overcrowded” housing and face huge upheaval. The claims come after contracts to provide accommodation for people seeking asylum in Britain were awarded to a private security firm that has been accused of “inhumane” policies, and whose staff are still being investigated over the death of an asylum seeker two years ago.

G4S will receive £203m from the UK Border Agency (UKBA) to house asylum seekers across Britain, from Newcastle to Birmingham and across to Ipswich, after it won two “super contracts” last month.

Campaigners are concerned that the company may attempt to lower costs by placing asylum seekers in poor-quality, unsuitable housing. Donna Covey, chief executive of the Refugee Council, says: “We have consistently raised concerns in the past about the poor standard of accommodation provided for many asylum seekers, and the situation has the potential to deteriorate further with very large super-regional contracts.

“Many asylum seekers have been through hugely traumatic circumstances in their home country and on their journey to the UK, and arrive here with nothing. It is unacceptable to house asylum seekers in sub-standard, unsecured and overcrowded conditions for cost-cutting purposes while they seek safety here and wait for a decision on their claim.”

Loutish behaviour

People seeking asylum in Britain have been housed since 2006 by regional public sector consortiums and housing associations. These consortiums are now handing over to the new providers, in a transition that UKBA aims to complete by the end of the year. The other four super contracts were shared by outsourcing companies Serco and Reliance. Reliance took over a government contract to deport foreign nationals and refused asylum seekers from G4S last year, and has admitted that its own guards have displayed“loutish” and “aggressive” behaviour towards minority ethnic people.

The three companies will take over the provision of housing for the 18,108 people currently in asylum accommodation at an estimated cost of £620m over seven years, which the Home Office claims will save £150m over the potential life of the contract.

Under the change of providers, existing housing arrangements could be renegotiated, requiring tenants to move to anywhere across the large geographical areas covered by each of the contracts, with transport provided by the companies

Peter Richardson, director of Leeds Asylum Seekers’ Support Network, says the contracts may force some of its clients and their children to move to accommodation provided in different cities. “It could be devastating,” he says. “They’ve already fled persecution, escaped torture, lost families and left everything behind. Now, just as they begin to settle into a new life in Leeds, everything is disrupted again.

“People we support are vulnerable and have no support structures apart from our volunteers. Being forced to move to a new city is going to separate them from the little they have managed to make into a home. It couldn’t come at a worse time for some families. Originally, children taking exams were not going to be moved but now they could be shifted right across the city at this critical moment in their lives.”

Dave Stamp, project manager at the Asylum Support and Immigration Resource Team in Birmingham, adds: “We are aware that many people will lose their homes as a consequence of this transfer of responsibility, [but] we have been given no indication of how this process will be managed, or what arrangements have been put in place to ensure that people’s individual needs – including those of children about to sit GCSE exams – will be respected during this period of upheaval.”

Campaigners are also concerned that asylum seekers will be separated from their trusted specialised health workers, who deal with problems ranging from HIV to the psychological scars of torture.

UKBA insists, however, that the housing and welfare of asylum seekers will not be jeopardised. A spokesman for the agency says: “Contracts for asylum services have been awarded to providers that demonstrated they could meet our high standards of support and ensure the welfare of individuals.”

Stephen Small, managing director of immigration and borders at G4S, says: “We take the welfare of all people who receive our services extremely seriously. Asylum seekers are among the most vulnerable people in our society and we are committed to ensuring they are integrated into local communitieswith the minimum of disruption, and into housing which is safe, sanitary and fit for purpose.

“G4S will be delivering services largely through a carefully selected supply chain of experienced housing providers, which includes local private andvoluntary sector housing organisations. We will use housing assessment specialists to drive up the standard of housing provided, and employ dedicated social cohesion experts to work with local authorities, migrant support groups, health and education bodies”.

G4S became a frontrunner for the contract to house and transport asylum seekers in December last year, when it was named as a preferred bidder, while still the subject of an inquiry by the Commons home affairs select committee.

The committee’s report, published in January, responded to the death ofJimmy Mubenga, a refused asylum seeker from Angola, while on a deportation flight in the custody of G4S guards in October 2010. Three guards who were escorting Mubenga when he died are on bail, as prosecutors weigh up the evidence against them.

The report raised concerns about the safety of restraining holds used by guards on deportees, guards’ open use of racist language, the quality of information given to guards about deportees’ health, and the excessive number of guards per deportee.

Cosy relationship

The committee also mentioned a “relationship between the agency [UKBA] and its contractors which had become too cosy”. It condemned G4S’s policy of taking extra detainees (“reserves”) to the airport without informing them that they would be taking the place of any deportees granted last-minute reprieves. Those reserves who weren’t deported were taken back into detention, but not necessarily to the centre they had left.

Keith Vaz, chair of the select committee, said on publication of the report: “It is simply inhumane to uproot somebody on the expectation that they will be returned to their home country only to then return them at the end of the day to a detention centre in the UK – sometimes a different one from the one they left that morning.”

In a separate report of an inspection of a G4S-run immigration detention centre, Nick Hardwick, the chief inspector of prisons, described this practice as “objectionable and distressing” and “inhumane”.

In addition, there are fears that asylum seekers who have been refused permission to remain in Britain could be left destitute as a result of the contracts going to private companies. In Glasgow, where Serco won the accommodation contract last month, 84 households who had their applications turned down have already been served with eviction notices. Ypeople, the charity that has provided accommodation since 2000, had refused to follow the UKBA policy of eviction for refused asylum seekers.

Ypeople’s chief executive, Joe Connolly, says: “Although Ypeople receives no funding for the cost of accommodating and supporting people whose asylum claims are rejected, we have, as a not-for-profit organisation, contributed in excess of £500,000 in the last year alone, which has helped significantly to alleviate destitution and provide shelter for those who have been refused permission to remain in the UK.”

Back at the Refugee Council, Covey says: “We will be working closely with all the contractors and UKBA, and monitoring feedback from our clients following the changes, to ensure that their living conditions are not only adequate but also safe and comfortable.”