Home Office fails to protect vulnerable migrants, high court judge rules | Immigration and asylum
The Home Office has failed to protect vulnerable immigrants locked up in detention centres, a high court judge has ruled.
Ms Justice Jefford found that there had been an unlawful failure of the “systems” designed to protect detainees of immigration background from inhuman and degrading treatment under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that these failures had continued for years. The decision could affect thousands of immigrants at risk behind bars.
The case was filed by two detainees from Egypt and Bangladesh who were detained between July 28, 2023 and March 11, 2024.
Both were detained at Brook House immigration detention center near Gatwick; Undercover footage here by BBC Panorama revealed abuse of defenseless detainees by guards in 2017. The Brook House public inquiry that followed raised many concerns about the risks to vulnerable immigration detainees.
The focus of the case was a security measure known as rule 35. The rule requires medical practitioners in detention centers to report to the Home Office when they have concerns about certain vulnerabilities that could make a person unsuitable for immigration detention, such as suicide risk or mental health problems; so that the Ministry of Internal Affairs can urgently review the ongoing detention.
The men who brought the case were suffering from worsening mental illness and appeared to have seriously harmed themselves while in custody. Both underwent periods of ongoing suicide monitoring, followed by a separate process known as the custodial assessment care and teamwork process (ACDT).
However, although they were on suicide watch, their suitability for continued detention was not assessed.
The judge found significant evidence that the system had not been working for years and that many of these problems were known by at least 2017.
He expressed concern about the “disconnect” between those managed under the ACDT process and the small number of rule 35 reports issued, particularly those relating to mental health issues or suicide risk.
The judge found that the home secretary had provided no convincing answers or evidence to justify why there were so few of these reports, particularly regarding the risk of suicide, determined by the number of people under constant supervision each year.
He said: “There is a clear and persistent picture, at least since the period covered by the Brook House inquiry, that the system intended to protect the Article 3 rights of adults at risk is failing.”
Lewis Kett, a solicitor at Duncan Lewis who represented the two men who brought the high court case, said: “Our clients welcome this important decision, which shows not only that their detention and treatment at Brook House was unlawful, but also emblematic of several years of failure by the Home Secretary to properly operate the systems that protect vulnerable people in custody from serious harm.
“This has placed countless immigration detainees with serious mental illness or suicidal tendencies at real risk of harm.”
Detention charities are calling for rules that exist on paper to be enforced to protect vulnerable detainees.
Director of Medical Justice Emma Ginn said her organization continues to see a comprehensive failure to complete these reports for those who need them.
“Over the last few months, these reports have been absent from Medical Justice asylum seeker clients who arrived in the UK on small boats and were detained for repatriation to France for the UK-France scheme, and who had met the threshold for these reports. This included one person who attempted suicide in custody.
“It is entirely possible that failure to prepare any of these reports could cause a person to attempt or die by suicide.”
The Ministry of Internal Affairs was contacted for opinion.
