| INFORMATION LEAFLET NO. 22 | |||||
Refugees and asylum seekers have the right to live in freedom like all other people in the world. But many states imprison them as if they were criminals. The public opinion does not take any notice of the fate of refugees who are in prison and there is almost no lobby to defend their rights. This leaflet aims to change this hopeless situation. We want to inform you about the situation of refugees in deportation camps and motivate a wider public to take action against the imprisonment of refugees. In this leaflet we report about groups, who are active in this area and their work. This report is not complete, but it gives examples for the situation in some countries. It is a collection of texts written by several people, who have described their direct observations. There are more groups who are active in this field than just those mentioned in this leaflet. But we hope that their example will motivate many other people to do something against the imprisonment of refugees and to support refugees who are in prison.
1.1. DETENTION IN GERMANY 1.2. DEATH IN A DEPORTATION CAMP 1.3. DETENTION IN GREAT-BRITAIN 2. DETENTION IN EASTERN EUROPE 2.1. DETENTION IN POLAND 2.2. DETENTION IN CZECH REPUBLIC 3.2. GROUPS OF VOLUNTEER-VISITORS IN LEIPZIG
1.
DETENTION
IN WESTERN EUROPE
Everyday life in the prisons for deportees is inhuman. Generally there is no or insufficient medical and psychological support, no possibility to get legal advice and there are many restrictions where contact with people outside the prison and visits to the prison are concerned.
Rarely a case dealing with the conditions in the deportation camps is heard in court. The case of bodily injury inflicted by a judicial offer in Glasmoor is therefore an exception. The Algerian Emene K. had been thrown against the door post of a gate by a jailer, which caused him to suffer a fracture of his cheekbone, abrasions, bruises and his tongue was torn. One year later the case was brought to court. The accused stated, that things worse than this had happened before. He claimed that he normally needed to use direct force when working with the prisoners three or for times a month. He stated that Emene K. had tried to free himself from the jailer's grip and in doing so crashed into the gate. Emene K. said that he had been knocked down more than once and that the jailer used his fists. But his account was not even taken seriously. The jailer was acquitted following the principle, to decide in favour of the accused if there are any reasonable doubts of his guilt. It is planned that he shall continue his work in Glasmoor. For Emene K. there is the threat that he will end up in deportation camp again. Most of the deportees don't understand the complicated legal proceedings they have to go through, which are based on special laws created for asylum-seekers and foreigners. And they don't have a clear understanding of why they are in prison. Therefore it doesn't make any sense to them, that they are imprisoned and even worse: They don't know how long they will be detained and also have to fear, that they may be deported to a possibly dangerous home-country or to another country, which is completely unknown to them. That is why the imprisonment is so unbearable. Boredom, fear, depression, impatience, desperation, aggression, nervous breakdowns, suicide - all of this is reality in the prisons for deportees in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Rachid Sbaai played football
during yard exercise on 27 August 1999. While doing so he was
involved in foul play. As a consequence of that he was punished
three days afterwards and sent into solitary detention for fourteen
days. He managed to take a lighter with him to the detention
cell. To draw attention to his situation he set fire to his mattress.
The fire got out of control. Sbaai started to shout and pushed
the alarm button. His shouts were heard by one of his friends
and he also pushed the alarm button. Despite of this he had to
witness that the shouts of Sbaai turned to silence after about
15 minutes. There was nobody in the central control office, where
both of the alarm signals should have been registered. Sbaai
died from fume poisoning. 1.3. DETENTION IN GREAT-BRITAIN At the same time as it produced the 1998 White Paper, the government of Great-Britain also initiated a major review of existing facilities within the immigration and prison services, with the express aim of identifying new sites in which to detain asylum seekers arriving at UK ports and airports. Having created a new asylum detention centre at a former military barracks in Oakington in which to hold 400 asylum seekers including, for the first time, women and children, whose applications for asylum would be fast-tracked; having transformed Aldington prison, near Ashford, into a special detention centre for asylum seekers; having commandeered a wing of South Yorkshire's Lindholme prison for the same purpose, the Home Office was, by January 2001, ready to set specific targets for detention and removal. It announced that it would double the number of asylum seekers and immigrants it detains and more than double the numbers it removes from the country. The influence of the EU
on British policies and vice versa In fact, the imprisonment of asylum seekers in this way is not new. Part of the New Labour government's justification for the creation of a factory-style system for the detention and removal of asylum seekers was the mess left by the previous Conservative administration. Despite the Conservatives' current call for the mandatory detention of all those who apply for asylum in the UK, they presided over chaotic detention arrangements which developed ad hoc and piecemeal. While there were small detention centres near airports and, by 1993, a new purpose-built high-security immigration and detention centre at Campsfield House, Oxford, the vast majority of an ever-increasing population of immigration detainees were held in existing prisons, often for extremely long periods of time. Both within Campsfield House and ordinary prisons, asylum seekers were denied the right to any sort of activity or meaningful employment and treated, in many respects, far worse than those convicted of a crime as has been acknowledged by a former Chief Inspector of Prisons. The New Labour government, however, in attempting to cohere the elements of these ad hoc arrangements into a special asylum prison regime linked to the politics of deterrence is attempting to establish something qualitatively different. And, once again, it is a system that bears the stamp of the EU, designed as it is to harmonise UK practices with those already existing on the European mainland where asylum seekers are imprisoned at different stages of the asylum process. It is a system characterised by centres to fast track the applications of new arrivals; special holding centres for interning problem applicants; discreet detention centres close to airports, where asylum seekers are held pending deportation. What has resulted, in all EU member states, is a separate prison complex for asylum seekers, underpinned by specific legal powers and instruments in a Europe-wide system of control and surveillance. The use of measures more germane to serious criminal investigation, such as the compulsory fingerprinting of all asylum seekers, has become routine, as has the complete disregard for civil liberties in the storage of personal data on asylum seekers on the Schengen Information System. This, the EU's largest computer database, can be accessed from 50,000 terminals across Europe. As around 90 per cent of the information stored on it concerns immigration rather than criminal cases, and as this database is considered to be at the heart of the EU's internal security system, it follows that the EU considers the movement of the world's 125 million displaced people the most important security issue it faces. Asylum seekers: no prisoners,
no prisoners' rights In fact, the UK government is right. These so-called guests are not prisoners under domestic UK law, for then a court would have had to detain them for a specific criminal offence. The unpalatable truth that must be camouflaged is that detained asylum seekers are internees - and internment is a wartime measure usually invoked against 'enemy aliens' (yet more proof that the New Labour government has gone to war with the displaced people of the world). Internees are separated from other prisoners in that they are usually committed to detention by 'emergency powers' such as those that obtained during the first and second world wars, under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (Northern Ireland), or during the 1991 Gulf war, when male Iraqi students were interned in British jails. Xeno-racism
In the first half of the 90s,
refugees and migrants who were on their way to Europe rarely
encountered problems inside Poland. Even a longer stay, mostly
in the surroundings of Warsaw, was possible. There was no permanent
danger of being controlled and imprisoned. At that time the biggest
problem consisted in finding a way to cross the border from Poland
to the West. This situation changed in 1996/97, when the border
control was reinforced step by step. And at the same time the
polish authorities began to imprison more and more refugees and
migrants, who were obviously on their way to Western-European
states and had intended to stay in Poland only for a short time.
In the Czech Republic the first
prison for deportees has been opened in November 1998. According
to Czech officials these prisons have been opened because of
immense pressure especially from Germany. The Czech Republic
since 1997/98 is seen as one of the main transit countries for
refugees on their way to Germany. Due to this pressure by the
German government the first Czech prison for deportees was opened
close to the German border. In the beginning this institution
was planned exclusively for refugees, which had been sent back
by the German border guards (BGS) before. In January 2000 a new
foreigner law came into force. In this law the kind as well as
the duration of imprisonment of deportees is laid down. Priests and groups trying to give support to and look after the people in deportation camps normally work under very difficult circumstances when trying to meet the refugees' practical needs. Many deportation camps are not very accessible. Bureaucratic hindrances for the access of volunteers to the camps are high; the misery of the imprisoned refugees also weighs heavily on the supporters, whose possibilities to influence the situation are very limited. The commitment to improve the conditions demands a lot of energy from everybody who is involved. Sometimes there is no energy left to take political action against the basic structural evil, i.e. the imprisonment of deportees. The Glasmoor-group of the Council for Refugees (Flüchtingsrat) in Hamburg meets on a regular basis every Sunday to take a walk round the prison for refugees in Glasmoor. In October 2001 there was a peaceful revolt of 50 prisoners during one of these walks round the prison. The prisoners refused to return back to their cells after their regular yard exercises and demanded their freedom. The people outside prison who took part in the Sunday's walk supported the demands of the refugees inside the prison and informed the media about what was happening. After about two hours the prisoners went back to their cells voluntarily. The direction of the prison had reacted to this action in a de-escalating manner and renounced to activate jailers and police at a large scale. But the media took notice of the prisoner's demands. The action can be seen as a success.
Another good example is a group
who supports refugees in prisons for deportees in Leipzig. It
exists since 1995 and has been officially recognised by the Saxonian
ministry of justice. This enables the members of the group to
apply for the status as an officially recognised volunteer, who
is taking care of prisoners in the JVA Leipzig (i.e. the Leipzig
place of detention). The visits for the prisoners take place
once a week on Tuesdays and the conversations between volunteers
and refugees are not supervised. Nevertheless the prisoners are
controlled before and after the visits occasionally. The deportees
inside the prison are informed of the possibility to receive
visits from the volunteers through the social workers during
the reception-procedure, by announcements in the prison and verbal
propaganda. If they want to receive visits they need to apply
to the so-called visitors service to be allowed to do so. Once
a year the volunteer group needs to present a written report
about their work to the direction of the JVA. Conversations with
the direction take place several times every year. There are a lot of groups who take action against the imprisonment of refugees. Many of these groups meet regularly. Everybody who is interested in working on this issue is welcome to join one of the groups. Please feel free to add organisations to this list, and send your information to the UNITED secretariat. You can always find an updated list of addresses in the database on the UNITED web site www.unitedagainstracism.org. Asylkoordination Österreich Schubhaft Sozialdienst Wien Arge Schubhaft Innsbruck Collectif contre les Expulsions
- Bruxelles Mouv. contre Racisme, Antisémitisme
et Xénophobie Gruppe Augenauf Zürich,
Postfach SOZE - Society of Citizens
Assisting Migrants Abschiebhaftgruppe Leipzig Antirassistische Initiative
/ ZAG Rhein-Main Aktionsbündnis
gegen Abschiebung Forschungsgesellschaft Flucht
+ Migration Glasmoorgruppe GrenzenLOS Bremen Kooperative Flüchtlingssolidarität
Hannover Büren-Gruppe Paderborn Hilfe für Menschen in
Abschiebehaft Büren AG Abschiebehaft des Flüchtlingsrats
NRW Pro Asyl - Bundesweite AG für
Flüchtlinge e.V. Antirassistische Gruppe für
Freies Fluten Münchener Flüchtlingsrat Bayrischer Flüchtlingsrat Freie Flüchtlingsstadt
Nürnberg ANAFE - Association Nationale
d'Assistance aux Frontières pour les Étrangers CIMADE - Service Oecuménique
d'Entraide REFLEX / Réseau No Pasaran! Finnish Refugee Council - Suomen
Pakolaisapu Campaign to Close Campsfield Barbed Wire Britain Network
Against Refugee and Migrant Detention Menedék - Hungarian
Association for Migrants HR Legal Counseling Office
/ Hungarian Helsinki Committee Centre for Defence of Human
Rights / Found. Mulicult. Hungary Associazione Ya Basta! Autonoom Centrum Participating Refugees in Multicultural
Europe Polish Helsinki Committee -
Helsinska Fund. praw Czlowieka This leaflet was produced for
UNITED by: |
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