Nothing suspicious about Asylum seeker hanged

international | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis

Tuesday July 20, 2004 12:08

by Eoin Dubsky

An article in today's Guardian newspaper about a riot at the UK's worst immigration removal centre, the Harmondsworth conplex, begins with a passage which might tell us something about why people there are rioting: "The Home Office today promised a full investigation after the discovery of a hanged detainee led to a "serious disturbance" overnight at the country's largest immigration detention centre. The death was not thought to be suspicious, but staff at the Harmondsworth complex - near Heathrow airport, west London - were forced to withdraw for their own safety."

A guy gets hanged, and there's nothing suspicious about it, not even just a little bit suspicious?

As the Guardian article explains, Harmondsworth has been heavily criticised by the Government's chief inspector of prisons, Anne Owers, for "failing to provide a safe and stable environment". It's an "immigration removal centre", so if they don't get out of there somehow they'll soon be on a plane back to their country when all the paperwork is ready.

Harmondsworth is run by UK Detention Services Ltd., a British subsidiary of French multinational Sodexho. Sodexho do some catering business here in Ireland, but they're also heavily invested in the growing for-profit prison industry in the UK and America.

According to Kevin Pranis, a Soros Justice Fellow and Prison Moratorium Project activist in the States, the French-based Sodexho group, which owns Sodexho Marriott Services (US), is the largest investor in US private prisons through its 11% holdings in Prison Realty Trust/Corrections Corporation of America. (http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/125/sodexho.shtml)

Comments (2 of 2)

asylum-seekers death in U.K.

by citizen x

Tue Jul 20, 2004 23:58

The documented conditions in the prisons/camps like Harmondsworth are desperate and there have been previous suicides. The U.K. government rightly stands indicted on the matter by several independent groups.
Conditions and facilities in Irish refugee camps ('Reception centres') are often very poor.
It is also virtually imprisonment, with soul-destroying routine, often administered oppressively.
It is truly depressing that in more than five years of such enforced accomodation the Irish broadcast or print media has been unwilling or unable to report and reveal the facts, as the scandal they are.
God help anyone in such places.

Third world junta prison conditions and treatment

by Poor millionaire

Wed Jul 21, 2004 00:40

Regiemes within such Detention centres, are stricter and harsher than normal prisons, because private security companies have to cut as many corners as possible in order to make a profit, also there is an assumption that 3rd world asylum seekers are use to third world junta prison conditions and treatment.

In Northern Ireland traumatised refugees and asylum seekers are punished, criminalised and detained in normal prisons along with ordinary criminals and sectarian paramilitaries, so much for them flooding us, bit difficult when they're locked up in prison.