Indefinite detention is dehumanising for refugees. This practice must end | Hugh Muir | Opinion
In our interconnected world, it is such a truism that everyone has a story to tell that we rarely ask to hear them. We should. Both sides would benefit. We might start with The Student’s Tale, about the young man studying epidemiology who is detained in Britain, having survived a perilous journey from Africa, menaced by the knives and guns of people smugglers. He had been forced to flee his village, having been denounced as an apostate.
Or The Lorry Driver’s Tale, the account of a trucker who travels from Calais to Dover and, seeing the misery and desperation of the migrants who dot his path, occasionally brings one across to a new life. The Witness’s Tale: the fortunes of a man falsely accused in his home country of being a terrorist, who makes it to Britain, helps the state convict a gang of murderous, brutal people smugglers, and is told that his reward is to be deportation back to a likely death. Perhaps The Abandoned Person’s Tale, the recollection of a youth rounded up in his homeland during a crackdown on student protests, who spends three years in detention here before eventual release. Each tale vastly different; each illuminating a system that should deal humanely on our behalf with the many people who arrive here seeking refuge, sanctuary and a better life, but which every day fails to deliver.
With the Refugee Tales project, a book published on Thursday, and by walking with refugees around the country â€" mirroring routes described in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales â€" a group of writers, authors, poets and academics have sought to tell those stories: to make the statistics flesh. To hear from migrants themselves about the fears and terrors and pressures that often led them to undertake arduous, terrifying journeys over land and sea, only to find themselves subject to our lamentable procedures for deciding what should happen next.
No one would argue that we don’t need some official process for assessing the claims of migrants and fulfilling our moral and practical obligations to those robbed of human rights around the world. But can we look at our detention centres, at the laws that govern this activity, at the attitudes that lead to arbitrary, often uncompassionate policing and detention, and say that this is a system we are proud of? Opinions will vary according to one’s view of migration and the level of immigration in the country. But from a standpoint of sheer humanity, consider this: Britain, having openly declared its mission to make the country a “really hostile environment for illegal migrationâ€, brings that aspiration into effect by being the only European country willing to keep migrants in indefinite detention. Two words, but consider what they mean.
Indefinite immigration detention is arbitrary from beginning to end. A person doesn’t know when they will be detained; and when they are picked up, they won’t know where they are being taken. Very often, the only belongings they will be allowed to take with them are the clothes they stand up in. Likewise, they won’t know when, or how, their detention will end. Durations vary, and detention might be only a matter of weeks, but it could just as well be months or years â€" the whole point being that the person detained doesn’t know.
Recall those debates â€" quite properly fraught â€" about whether or not a person suspected of terrorism could be detained for 28 or 42 days. A suspected terrorist can be detained for 14 days before supervisory safeguards kick in. The longest period a person is known to have been detained is nine years. To be so detained, without charge and without sentence, is to be rendered fundamentally vulnerable because it is unclear on what basis such detention will end. We are outraged when we hear of increases and abuses of detention in other cultures; detaining people arbitrarily is always a deeply worrying indicator of a culture’s ethical health. We should be equally outraged, therefore, that at any one time in the UK more than 3,000 people are indefinitely detained.
The detention is without charge and without limit, and according to the most recent Home Office statistics over 50% of those detained are not “removed†(as is the technical trigger for detention) but released back into the community. Repeated reports â€" by the United Nations human rights commission in 2012, the all-party parliamentary groups on refugees and migration in 2015, and most recently by Stephen Shaw in 2016 â€" have demonstrated beyond doubt that indefinite detention is a cruel and inhumane practice. There is clear political understanding, in other words, that such open-ended detention has to end.
This may not be a politically popular stance to take right now. There is much talk of taking control and reasserting tradition. But those who seek change can also stake claim to tradition. As Magna Carta, sealed by King John at Runnymede, put it: “No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go against him, nor will we send against him, save by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right to justice.â€
There is much we can do to improve the process, but one immediate act stands out: indefinite detention must end. Replace it with an absolute limit of 28 days. Twenty-eight days in our soul-crushing detention centres still seems an eternity. But at least we would be moving closer to a system in keeping with our notion of ourselves as a liberal, tolerant nation. Right now, as the stories tell us, we are light years away.
• Refugee Tales is edited by David Herd, who contributed to this piece, and Anna Pincus. It is published by Comma Press
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