UK immigration detention centre 'no place for children'
UK immigration detention centre 'no place for children'
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Wednesday, 17, Feb 2010 12:07
By Sarah Garrod.
The children's commissioner has today issued a report on the treatment of children at an immigration detention centre, in which he says it is "no place for children".
Sir Al Aynsley-Green, children's commissioner for England looked at the experiences of children in a progress report into conditions in which they are being held at Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre.
In the report Sir Al said there were concerns that still needed to be addressed and said that increasingly children were being separated from their parents when being taken to the centre.
The report, which contains recommendations for further improvement, follows up one published by the commissioner in 2009. Since last year's report, UKBA and SERCO, which manages Yarl's Wood, have shown a commitment to change procedures and improve conditions, the commissioner reported.
Following the previous report the commissioner said he had seen an improved environment with a "less institutional feel", newly constructed classrooms, fewer prison style uniforms being worn, better facilities for feeding babies, a new complaints system and an end to transporting children to Yarl's Wood in caged vans.
Despite these improvements the Sir Al said there was still more to be done, and said he was particularly concerned that there have also been reports of unacceptable delays in providing treatment. In one case, he reported, a mother informed a nurse at 11:20 GMT that her five-year-old child had fallen earlier in the playground. The child could not lift her arm and was not seen by a GP until 2:05 GMT the next day and went to A&E at 7:02 GMT; the child had a broken arm.
Sir Al said: "It is the government's role rather than mine to decide whether a child should be removed from the UK but I want to make sure the process by which they are removed is humane. Yarl's Wood is no place for a child.
"Ultimately, I would like to see a far faster process and an end to the detention of children in the asylum system. There needs to be more education about the alternatives to detention. But I recognise an end to child detention won't happen overnight and am working to improve the arrest and detention process by looking at it from the child's perspective."
Following the Sir Al's report the Refugee Council said it was a "timely reminder" of the harm of detaining children. Donna Covey, chief executive of the Refugee Council said: "Children continue to be terrified by dawn raids, sometimes being separated from their parents, being removed from their houses without knowing what is going to happen to their things.
"Perhaps most worrying is that some incidents of harm to children's physical and mental health are still not being properly treated or recorded. There can be no excuse for perfunctory examinations of children or dismissing behaviour such as a child wetting himself at nursery when he previously did not have this problem.
"These are children we are talking about. It is unacceptable that they are detained at all.
"The government must heed the commissioner's words and end this abhorrent practice now."