Just after the turn of this century, government introduced a new approach to the incarceration of asylum seekers.
There was to be no use of prisons and the concept of detention centres was to be replaced with the introduction of removal centres.
Taken at face value this represented an apparent acceptance that it is wrong to treat as criminals those who have committed no crime. Critically however, the pejorative language used by government runs in a different direction. The public are routinely encouraged to conclude that asylum seekers are wrong-doers, a view illustrated in a recent conversation where it was put to me that detainees in Dungavel should consider themselves lucky because they are treated a lot better than 'our criminals.'
The Home Office refused our request to visit Dungavel on the grounds that an independent inspection regime exists. However, our aim is to make an assessment of whether the regime in Dungavel is appropriate as part of a wider system which has implications for the human rights of refugees. Britain is the only country in Europe that allows indefinite detention of migrants. In Dungavel, people can be held for months and years, rather than weeks.
So conditions at Dungavel cannot be judged without an understanding of the wider context of the way the asylum system actually functions. A key tenet of the 2001 detention rules is that those held in centres can apply for bail or challenge the decision in the courts. We are told however, that the reality for detainees is of a slow, creaking system in which detainees are often denied the right to be present at their own hearings.
The detention rules also allow for the joint incarceration of both men and women, something which is almost entirely absent in the UK prison system. The reality of the operation of the asylum system dictates that a handful of women in Dungavel are outnumbered by a very large proportion of men. Is this appropriate?
A large number of Dungavel detainees come from south of the border, often transferred from the UK's big detention centres. The effect of indefinite detention on the mental health and wellbeing of detainees is severe and worsened by the fact that many are held far from friends and family and are living in fear of removal. Thus, a regime which might indeed be independently judged as adequate, might still be judged unfair in a wider context.
There is of course an alternative. Accept that no system for asylum comes without its difficulties, but that the starting point should be to uphold the human rights of asylum seekers. Closing Dungavel could indeed be the beginning of a path to a more humane system for asylum policy in the UK.
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