Charity seeking to raise £15,000 for challenge, will argue Home Secretary has knowingly broken law
Detention Action announced yesterday that it has begun crowdfunding for its legal challenge over the treatment of asylum seekers at the Home Office's short-term processing centre in Manston, Kent.
Image credit: WikipediaThe charity, which supports people in immigration detention, is seeking to raise £15,000 to cover the initial costs of the legal action.
Detention Action is bringing the challenge together with a woman who was held at Manston for three weeks. The Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) trade union, which represents Home Office staff, is also joining the legal action. Duncan Lewis is representing the claimants.
Last week, Detention Action announced it had begun the action due to serious concern for the welfare of thousands of people, including children, who were being detained at Manston for periods beyond legally permitted limits.
The charity said yesterday it believes Home Secretary Suella Braverman has knowingly broken the law at Manston by:
- Routinely holding people in detention beyond legal time limits;
- Failing to ensure that children are protected from harm;
- Forcing children and women to sleep alongside adult men they do not know;
- Failing to provide access to legal advice for people she has detained;
- Exposing people to infectious diseases due to overcrowding and poor sanitation.
Paul O'Connor of the PCS told the Guardian on Saturday: "We're taking this action because conditions at Manston are desperate and a disgrace. We cannot and will not countenance our members and detainees being subjected to these horrendous, inhumane and dangerous conditions. … The Home Secretary is acting outside the law, as her own minister acknowledges, and there are, we believe, many detainees now held illegally at Manston."
Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID) has also begun separate legal action. BID announced last week that it had sent a pre-action letter to the Home Secretary over a failure to provide access to justice for people held at Manston.
BID said: "By holding detainees at the non-residential Manston Short Term Holding Facility for more than 48 hours without allowing adequate access to phones or legal help, the Home Office has breached its own rules and the European Convention on Human Rights Article 5: Access to justice."
BID's letter says the Home Secretary should have ensured that the same essential legal safeguards in place at Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) were also applied at Manston, as it was being used to detain people for periods equivalent to those of standard IRCs.
Jacqueline McKenzie, head of immigration and asylum at BID's solicitors Leigh Day, said: "This challenge has come about because our client is extremely concerned about the prolonged detention of people seeking asylum, including unaccompanied minors, in horrific circumstances. Manston is not fit for purpose and was meant to be no more than a short-term facility for processing asylum seekers within 24 to 48 hours. Their detention, which in some cases has gone on for several weeks, without access to legal advice, NGO support, telephones, and family visits, is in breach of the Home Office's own policies and breaches a number of statutory provisions. Moreover, this treatment of asylum seekers puts us in breach of our obligations under the Refugee Convention and International Declaration of Human Rights."
As was widely reported, 4,000 people were held in overcrowded conditions at Manston, with some being held for weeks.
Immigration minister Robert Jenrick told the House of Commons at the start of this week that numbers at Manston had fallen from 4,000 to 1,600 in seven days.
Jenrick stated on Monday: "Some 40,000 people have crossed the channel on small boats so far this year, and the Government continue to have a statutory responsibility to provide safe and secure accommodation for asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute. To meet that responsibility, we have had to keep people for longer than we would have liked at our processing facility at Manston, but we have been sourcing more bed spaces with local authorities and in contingency accommodation such as hotels. I can tell the House that, as of 8 o'clock this morning, the population at the Manston facility was back below 1,600. That is a significant reduction from this point last week, with over 2,300 people having been placed in onward accommodation. I thank my Border Force officers, members of the armed forces, our contractors and Home Office staff, who have worked tirelessly to help achieve that reduction."
The chair of Parliament's Home Affairs Committee, Dame Diana Johnson MP, released a statement on Wednesday following a visit to Manston.
Johnson stated: "What the Home Affairs Committee saw at Manston revealed that while overcrowding has reduced, and staff are making valiant efforts to improve conditions for detainees, the crisis is not over. We encountered families who had been sleeping on mats on the floor for weeks. Meanwhile there are ongoing questions about the legality of the Home Secretary's decision to detain people at the site for longer than 24 hours.
"The Home Office has been running to keep up with this escalating crisis, rather than warding it off at the outset through planning and preparation. The numbers of people crossing the Channel in small boats this year will not have been a surprise to the Government, so why were adequate preparations not made? This question matters – because we may still see another major upsurge in the number of people arriving at Manston before the end of this year. The Home Secretary needs to end this crisis once and for all. That requires dealing with the backlog in the asylum system and establishing a system that is efficient and fair."