Asylum seekers should no longer be held indefinitely in immigration removal centres because they have become places of “despair” that undermine the principles of British justice, the chief inspector of prisons has said.
Nick Hardwick, who is also responsible for the immigration detention facilities, called for a radical overhaul of the system to impose strict limits on the time people can be held while awaiting deportation.
An independent review of the decision to detain them, currently taken by an immigration official, should be held within weeks, preferably by a judge, he said in an interview with The Times.
It was “uncomfortable” that in the year of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, “people are being detained on the say-so of a politician or a civil servant . . . We should see the deprivation of somebody’s liberty as a very serious thing, not to be done lightly and there should be proper safeguards to it,” he said. “I don’t think people should be detained indefinitely without oversight, I think much more needs to be done for the people who are most vulnerable. If they are mentally ill or have been tortured they shouldn’t be detained at all.
“You shouldn’t be detained unless there’s a realistic prospect of removal. One of the things that’s really striking in the places we inspect is that about a third . . . will get released back into the community. If a third of them are released then why were they detained in the first place?”
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Last week, a Commons inquiry criticised the “deeply shocking” treatment of asylum seekers held in detention centres and said nobody should be held for more than 28 days. Almost 30,000 immigrants were detained awaiting removal in the year to September 2014. Of those who left, 144 had been in detention for between one and two years and 30 for two years or longer.
There has been controversy about the conditions at the centres, including Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire, where a guard was secretly filmed last week calling inmates “animals” and declaring “let them slash their wrists”. Although Mr Hardwick said he would not use the phrase “institutional racism”, he added: “I’m sure there are people who are racist and I think there is racist behaviour in immigration centres.”
• Detainees in Harmondsworth detention centre in West Drayton, Middlesex, Britain’s largest immigration removal centre, said they had begun a hunger strike following protests over the weekend against conditions and alleged human rights abuses inside the complex. In a letter seen by Channel 4 News, asylum seekers were demanding an end to “indefinite deprivation of liberty and human rights”.