By Wesley Johnson of The Independent, 17 October 2011:

Hundreds of children are being detained at the UK’s ports and airports, figures showed today.

A total of 697 children under 18 were held for up to 24 hours at the Port of Dover and at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted in the four months between May and August.

The Children’s Society, which obtained the details under the Freedom of Information Act, said the figures raised serious questions about the Government’s commitment to end the immigration detention of children.

Of those children detained, one in three was unaccompanied, the figures showed.

Bob Reitemeier, the charity’s chief executive, said: “We are horrified at the excessive numbers of children being held in the South East and very disappointed that Government has not kept these numbers to a minimum.

“It is of great concern that this appears to be happening without sufficient monitoring centrally by the Home Office, including why they are being held, their age and critically the length of time that they were held.

“This raises serious questions about the commitment to end the immigration detention of children.”

He urged the Home Office to launch an investigation into “why excessive numbers of children are being held on entry to the UK”.

The Home Office should also “make sure appropriate measures are in place to meet the welfare needs of what are often extremely vulnerable children”, he added.

A UK Border Agency (UKBA) spokesman said: “We have always been clear that we would retain the ability to hold families who have arrived at the border without the right to enter the UK.

“Where it is considered in the family’s best interests not to stay at the airport until the next flight, the UK Border Agency will make arrangements for them to stay at Tinsley House.”

A report in April by the independent monitoring board (IMB) at Heathrow Airport warned that children were still being held overnight in “degrading” and “wholly unsuitable” conditions.

They were among more than 15,000 people who were detained by immigration officials at Britain’s biggest airport last year in rooms with no natural light, poor ventilation and inadequate washing facilities.

The lack of progress since the “degrading” conditions were highlighted last year was “unacceptable on grounds of humanity”, the watchdog said.

“The UK Border Agency has again failed in its duty to treat everyone in its care in Heathrow holding rooms with decency,” the report said.

“In our last report we drew attention to the wholly unsuitable conditions in which men, women and children were held.

“There has been no change: they are still held in these conditions and still for too long. Lack of change is unacceptable on grounds of humanity.

“We are opposed to the continued detention of families for immigration purposes at Heathrow.”

It called for Home Secretary Theresa May to review urgently the UKBA’s powers for improving the accommodation and to give priority to the provision of a short-term holding facility offering overnight accommodation at, or near, the airport.

David Wood, the UKBA’s strategic director for criminality and detention, said at the time that the welfare of children was “an absolute priority”.

But he added that families with children may be held on arrival in the UK “while checks are made to determine whether they should be admitted to the country and, if not, until a return flight can be arranged for them”.

Last month, ministers welcomed the “final stage in the Government’s pledge to end the detention of children” as new pre-departure accommodation for families being removed from the UK was opened.

Barnardo’s provides help and support to the families while they are being held in the new Cedars centre in Pease Pottage, West Sussex, for up to a week before being removed.

The children’s charity has also laid down a series of rules for the Government to follow to ensure it keeps the charity’s support in removing children of failed asylum seekers from the UK.

But critics have accused Barnardo’s of “legitimising detention”.

For the link to The Indpendent article, click here

Posted by Dr Gill Gillespie:

This is the harrowing story of refugees who, because of the Dublin regulations, are deported back to the first EU country they entered, often Italy or Greece, which have the worst welfare provision.  This article, published in The Guardian UK on Friday 7 October by Harriet Grant and John Domokos, tells some of these refugees’ stories.

Awet spreads his hands out and shows us his scarred fingertips. “He burned his fingertips so he could apply for asylum like a new person,” explains his friend.

A group of men are gathered in the back room of a large squat on the outskirts of Rome, talking about their struggle to beat the European asylum system. They explain that it is common for asylum seekers to burn their fingers, so the fingerprint record of their entry into Italy is destroyed.

Awet mimes placing his hands on a hob. “But after five days … [he holds up his hands to show that the burns have healed] normal,” he says, clapping them together with a disappointed sigh.

The Anagnina squat, in a disused glass-fronted office block, looms large over the surrounding industrial estate. The building is home to around 700 migrants and refugees, including families, from four trouble spots of north-eastern Africa: Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia.

The satellite dishes on the front of the building are redundant and many of the windows have been smashed. Children’s toys scatter the dimly lit corridors. Beds consist of simple mattresses or cardboard on the floor, and there is no hot water or heating. Electricity is sporadic, and there are only a few toilets for the hundreds who live here.

As the other men lean in around him, keen to describe the impossibility of building a new life in Italy, Awet waves his green refugee card that shows he came from Eritrea. “Italy is bad. No work, no house, nothing.”

Like all the others, he soon left and travelled to Norway, but when it was discovered that he had already been fingerprinted in Italy he was deported back. Awet clutches a tattered Norwegian identity card as he talks.

Under EU law, asylum seekers have to remain in the first European country they enter. This is known as the “Dublin” regulation after the 1990 summit at which the original system was adopted (coming into force seven years later).

For many European countries including the UK, Dublin is a key tool in a regime of tough border controls, allowing refugees to be deported back to Europe‘s southern border countries where they first entered the EU. Countries such as Italy and Greece, with minimal welfare provision for refugees, receive the most Dublin returns each year because so many of the asylum seekers who land there do not wish to stay.

To the men in this hot, dark room and to thousands more who attempt to beat the system each year, Ireland’s capital city is a dirty word. “Dublin is a virus,” Awet says. “Yes, Dublin is like Aids.”

The rest all nod – they too have been fingerprinted in Italy, and know they will never be “cured”. Sitting in a circle, they list the places they have tried to start afresh: Norway, England, Switzerland, Sweden, England again.

David, 21, arrived here four years ago, travelling overland from Ethiopia, through Libya and across the Mediterranean. “I told them I was 17, they gave me €200 and told me to go anywhere I liked. They put me in the street. So I came here.”

Finding no work, David decided to travel on to the UK. “There they gave me a one-bedroom flat, I started at Bedford college, I learned English and they gave me £55 a week. I was happy.” He smiles sadly. “Then they found my fingerprints.” As soon as he was 18, David was deported, and returned to the Anagnina squat: “I felt sad, I cried.” He says life is not possible here in Italy: “No, no life here. Just living.”

These homeless refugees are part of a legal and diplomatic battle currently being fought all over Europe. Italy, which like Greece is struggling with the twin pressures of the financial crisis and a large increase in north-African migrants from this year’s uprisings, says the Dublin regulation is adding to its burden. Removals to Greece, meanwhile, have been suspended across much of the EU because of the severe conditions there, pending the outcome of a test case in the European court of justice.

Human rights lawyers in Britain are also trying to stop asylum seekers being sent back to Italy. They say the lack of support and housing in Italy is leaving thousands, at all stages of the asylum process, living in dangerous and unsanitary squats like Anagnina, or on the street.

The Dublin regulation was introduced partly to avoid “asylum shopping”, wherein people like David and Awet might be drawn to better welfare systems in countries such as the UK and Norway. Critics of the Italian system say welfare is crucial to help integrate refugees, and the lack of welfare in Italy is an urgent problem.

“We speak about legislation but forget to translate this into a life,” says Laura Boldrini, spokesperson for the UN refugee agency UNHCR in Italy.

“Refugees don’t know the language, they may be traumatised, they are lost and don’t know what to do – rebuilding a life is not a joke. International protection becomes a box with no key; to open it you need integration.”

The British government is, nonetheless, fighting hard to keep the Dublin regulation in place, and in a case before the high court next Tuesday, the Home Office will argue that Italy is a safe country, with enough support available for all those in the asylum system.

It is midnight at Termini station in central Rome, and the streets are still busy with tourists and late-night drinkers. But it takes only minutes to find some recent arrivals to Italy who have struggled to settle.

Siako and his friends are lying on pieces of cardboard at the back of the station. They stand out from the other homeless who sleep, often passed out from drink, all along the street, because they are young, clean and smartly dressed. Many are listening to music on headphones. But Siako, 23, is fizzing with anger. He jumps to his feet, pulls out his refugee accreditation and unfolds it, shaking it in the air. He waves his arms around, pointing at his sleeping friends: “He has documents, he has documents – over there, they all have documents. But we all sleep on the street.

“Frankly, in Africa, if someone had told me that Italy was like this, I would have said he was lying. If someone said that even when you have the legal papers you still sleep on the street, I would’ve said that’s wrong, that’s not possible. You must see it to believe it.”

As he talks, a van pulls up and hearty-looking Americans get out and pass round bags of sandwiches. The men take them without smiling. “We came from Ivory Coast to escape the war, through Libya,” Siako explains. “And now we are sleeping on the street.”

His friend looks up and says, “I was crying here yesterday, thinking about my papa at home dying. Italian people walk past and they think I’m crazy. Everybody is going crazy here because they have no home.”

Siako’s story is typical: he was given accommodation in a camp at first while his claim was processed. But once he was recognised as a refugee, he was on his own. Unlike in the UK or other northern European countries, in Italy there is almost no integration for refugees once they are given protection, and no welfare support. Many refugees describe a life that is a constant struggle for basic survival, walking for hours across Rome to get food at handouts from churches or NGOs.

Dr Lê Quyên Ngô Dình is a director at Caritas, one of Rome’s biggest refugee charities. She says the introduction of the Dublin rules changed the pressures on Italy, but the country has yet to change its system in response. There are reception camps that offer a short and limited initial stay to nearly all asylum seekers, but only 3,000 spaces in the official integration accommodation that follows. The interior ministry says there have been 10 times that many asylum seekers so far this year – plus the number of Dublin returns arriving at Rome airport alone has increased significantly – to between 10 and 20 a day.

“Ten years ago, Italy was a transit country, but since Dublin we have seen an increase in people staying here,” Lê Quyên says. “And this is a big problem for Italy. The system is the one that worked 10 years ago; 3,000 beds was enough then, now it is not enough.”

“If you get one of those, you get good care. But if not, you are on the street … You have the rights, but because the Italian welfare system is so weak – they are just rights on paper.”

Christopher Hein, director of the Italian Refugee Council, says that court cases such as those being brought in the UK over conditions in Italy are a distraction, when what is actually required is a wholesale reform of the Dublin regulation. “I am not here to defend the Italian non-system of reception. But I sometimes feel this distracts from the real issue, which is the Dublin regulation itself.”

Along with other refugee groups across Europe, Hein is working to have the Dublin system abolished.

“Human beings, a big percentage of whom have suffered violence and persecution in their country of origin or on the journey – they are just pushed from one place to another like a package … They are being re-traumatised by Dublin.”

Hein wants a common EU asylum policy that would allow asylum seekers to choose the country they want to go to. It would, he says, allow refugees to join up with family and community support networks, and enable them to build a life, and work. “This would be far less costly for the social budgets of member states because it would facilitate integration.”

One community that is drawn to the UK in particular is Afghans. Behind the last platform at Rome’s busy Ostiense station, around 80 Afghans including several children live in a squalid, makeshift camp. They sleep in donated tents, holes ripped in their sides to release some of the suffocating summer heat.

There is a small standpipe for water and a few temporary toilets have been placed outside. Children run through piles of debris as commuters wait for trains on the other side of a chainlink fence.

Arif, a journalist from Afghanistan, was deported from the UK three weeks ago. Arif says he left his country with his life in danger, passing through Italy to get to the UK, where he has a brother. “But I knew I couldn’t claim asylum in the UK because of my fingerprints”.

Arif lived with his brother in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, and worked illegally in a fast-food restaurant for four years. He says he didn’t want to, but the Dublin system drove him underground. British immigration officials raided the restaurant last month and he was deported.

Arif says the British authorities told him that “everything in Italy would be OK”. But after 20 days he has been offered no accommodation despite asking for help from the Italian authorities, and has ended up homeless and back at Ostiense station.

“I’m tired, tired of everything. I want to stay with my family in England, but because of Dublin I have to sleep here,” he says, pointing at the tents under the railway bridge.

At the camp’s gate, a group of young boys gather. Feroz, 16, has recently arrived from Afghanistan by boat, landing in Rimini.

He angrily tells us about his new neighbours, some of whom, he says, have already been sent back from other European countries. Others are very young and need help in Italy.

“This guy here is 12 years old. The government are deaf, they can’t hear people. I want to ask other European countries: where is the help?”

He points at another friend, caught in the classic Dublin trap: “What can he do? He is 18, his family are in Sweden – but his fingerprint is in Italy.”

For the full story, including a video, please click here