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Ugandan asylum seekers in UK beaten, deported
By PAUL REDFERN
Special Correspondent
Dozens of East Africans are reported to have been beaten up by private security officials following failed requests for asylum in the UK.
The issue was highlighted in a joint report by the UK newspaper, the Independent, and a group co-ordinating the representation and medical care of failed asylum-seekers.
It has presented a dossier of 200 cases compiled by doctors, lawyers and immigration centre visitors that purports to show systematic evidence of both physical and mental abuse of failed asylum seekers.
Some of the claims include sexual assault and racist abuse.
One Ugandan whose case was highlighted by the report was Milton Apollo Okello, a 25-year-old man who was allegedly tortured by the Ugandan security services before fleeing to the UK to request political asylum.
His request for refugee status was, however, turned down and following this he was frog-marched to a plane and tied to his seat by British security officials prior to an attempt to send him back to Uganda.
At the last moment, however, he received a reprieve following which he was taken to a van and allegedly beaten and racially abused.
“The driver opened the sliding door and I was pushed into the middle of the seat,” Mr Okello said.
“Two of the officers got on one side of me and the others came in on the other side. Officer A then punched me hard in the face and he said: ‘These black monkeys don’t want to go back to their country’.”
Force is reported to have been used on asylum seekers as the private security companies are believed to not be paid if they don’t “deliver” the failed asylum seeker to their country of birth.
The Border and Immigration Agency, which contracts the security companies to help carry out the removals, said any allegations of misconduct would be “thoroughly investigated,” and that “all allegations of physical and racial abuse are referred to the police.”
The three security companies involved — Group4 Securicor, International Training Academy and GEO — say that none of the allegations have been proven.
The worst case, according to the Independent, involved 29-year-old Cameroonian woman, Beatrice Guessie, who was so badly beaten on a flight back to Cameroon that she collapsed on arrival.
The Cameroonian airport authorities refused to accept Beatrice, despite allegedly being offered a bribe of $300 to do so.
She was then flown back to the UK and taken to Hillingdon hospital, where she was treated for severe genital bleeding and multiple bruising over her body.
She was subsequently returned to Yarl’s Wood detention centre, itself the subject of numerous complaints over the past five years.
It is difficult to establish exactly how many women have been forced to return to Uganda because the Home Office won’t comment on individual cases and says it does not keep a catalogue of exactly who it deports to where.
But it is known that in the first quarter of last year, nearly 5,000 people were deported from the UK, an increase of 43 per cent on the same period last year.
The British government is happy to be seen as “getting tough” on the issue of asylum to please the increasingly hostile right-wing press and because of growing support for the far-right British National Party.
Human-rights groups say the British government’s policy is a disgrace and that while there are some people who abuse the asylum system, many other vulnerable people, particularly women, are being forced out of the country to face an uncertain and dangerous future.
The Guardian said that in Home Office interviews of asylum seekers, “disbelief is automatic” and interviewers spend their time “trying to catch asylum seekers out in lies.”
Even the United Nations has expressed its concern. A report by the UN High Commission for Refugees last year concluded that “serious problems remain both in the quality of individual decisions and the context in which they are made.”
The National Coalition of Anti-Deportations Campaigns says it is seeing more deported women and children than ever before and this is because “women are easy targets, are always at home and are not likely to put up a fight.”
In 2005, dozens of women at Yarl’s Wood went on hunger strike at their treatment in the detention centre and recently Home Office Minister Tony McNulty ordered that the healthcare of asylum seekers in Britain’s detention centres be independently monitored, following what the Independent newspaper termed “a catalogue of suicides and alleged mistreatment.”
The women’s hunger strike gained support when Anne Owers, an inspector of prisons in the UK, condemned the lack of facilities for children in Yarl’s Wood and the fact that their welfare was being ignored by the authorities.
The matter has also been raised by two MPs — Jeremy Corbyn and Alastair Burt — in parliament.
The private company GSL UK, which runs Yarl’s Wood, said at the time that it had nothing to hide and “welcomes close and independent scrutiny.” It maintains that all the women who were on hunger strike were constantly monitored and were treated “with the utmost care and attention.”
It also said that there was “no question of people not being looked after properly.”
The company added that all its staff had received “thorough training” and there was “huge emphasis” on the fact that there would be “no tolerance of inappropriate behaviour among themselves or towards detainees.”
Staff are said to have behaved very professionally despite having to “deal with very challenging behaviour from detainees who do not have to abide by the same code of conduct.”
However, the women who are detained allege that abuse from staff at the centre is a daily occurrence. One told how the women were allegedly called “black monkeys who don’t deserve to be here.” The women also allege that staff punish anyone they take a dislike to for no reason.
The Ugandan women at Yarl’s Wood alleged they suffer from poor medical attention, bad food, harassment and sexual intimidation by male staff. They say that they are poorly represented legally and have suffered from corrupt lawyers.
The British government has had problems with Yarl’s Wood for some time and human-rights groups have called for its closure. It has suffered fires and allegations of abuse from people who are detained there.
Independent observers say that 33 asylum seekers have taken their own lives over the past five years, seven of whom were in Immigration Removal Centres and six in prisons. Two of these were East African, including a Kenyan who was found hanging from his police cell last year and a Ugandan who was found hanging in the toilet in the psychiatric ward of a hospital in Ascot in 2003.
Britain’s Home Office, which won’t comment on individual cases, insists that all asylum application cases are looked at carefully and anyone has the right of appeal whatever their country of origin.
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