New prison report backs our view "don't detain torture survivors"

Freedom from Torture welcomes a new report by the Chief Inspector of Prison on immigration detention centres. It adds great weight to our view that torture survivors should never be detained under Immigration Act powers, since the further detention of people who have already suffered so greatly is, from any moral standpoint, inadmissible.

None of the five centres inspected, the report Introduction & Summary of Findings: Inspection of five Immigration Service custodial establishments concludes, could be said to be "a place of safety”, protecting against "physical and psychological harm” or providing mental health care of an acceptable quality.

Dr Michael Peel, the Medical Foundation's Health and Human Rights Advisor notes that the report also mentions inadequate provision of translation and legal services, and "unacceptable and unnecessary” random strip searches.

"The chief inspector's recommendations on these topics should be adopted now,” says Dr Peel. "We draw attention to a further recommendation that could be adopted with little cost, indeed at considerable savings: Protocols should be agreed for the release of medical information, with consent, to the immigration authorities and detainees' representatives, if such information is relevant to fitness to detain or to the detainee's asylum claim, and the action that should follow."

The healthcare professional in the removal/detention centre is often the first person to whom detainees are able to disclose the trauma they suffered before fleeing their country, yet no guidelines exist about the practical, ethical, and legal issues involved in transmitting and acting upon that information, which is vital to treatment and may form the core of their asylum claim.

"Nor are detainees aware of their rights or, if psychologically vulnerable, necessarily capable of exercising those rights,” he says. "Information that a detainee has been tortured is often not sent to the immigration authorities. When it is sent, the detention centre rules provide no framework as to how the secretary of state should act upon that information. In our experience, too often he does nothing. Indeed such information (or the awareness of such information) is often not even provided to appeal adjudicators, who decide the reasonableness of detention.”

A consistent finding of the report is that, whether or not in-patient psychiatric care was in place, "those who were disturbed but not sectionable and arguably not fit for detention remained in a custodial rather than a therapeutic environment”.

"Whether detention centres or (as recently renamed) removal centres, such institutions remain ‘custodial establishments',” says Dr Peel. "As such, they are not fit for survivors of torture.”