Yarl’s Wood

What is really going on at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre? Why are 50 women detainees on hunger strike? The report the UK Border Agency does NOT want you to see.
Video

UKBA Culture: For anyone who hasn’t seen this yet

Perrett, 29, also alleges that one official boasted to her that he tested the claims of boys from African countries who said they had been forcibly conscripted as child soldiers by making them lie down on the floor and demonstrate how they shot at people in the bush.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/feb/02/border-staff-asylum-seekers-whistleblower#

A tale of migration to the “free world”

Activist blog about Calais and the wider immigration context.

http://newleftglobaljustice.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/a-tale-of-migration-to-the-free-world/

Disturbing video of conditions inside French Detention Centre

The French website ‘Liberation’ has been given a copy of a film made by a member of the French border police from inside of the detention centre at Mayotte just last month. The video, which you can watch online by clicking the link below, shows the horrific conditions inside the centre, which was built to house 60 people but which the members of the border police state regularly holds more than 100 and has held as many as 240. On the day this vidoe was shot there were 202 people inside the Centre.

http://www.liberation.fr/medias/0101310424-le-centre-de-retention-de-la-honte-l-une-des-dix-videos-politiques-2008

It is revealing that it is members of the Border Police themselves who are coming out and denouncing the situation. One of them who spoke to Liberation called conditions
“unacceptable. […] There are only 60 mattresses… The showers are visible under the floor of men. There are no toilets for women and children. ”

Another officer who works at Mayotte goes further.
“The conditions of detention of undocumented migrants are appalling. People are treated like animals. And we, we have the pressure of the hierarchy to do our job without saying anything. The objective is to meet the expectations of the ministry.”

Inhuman conditions in detention centres are not limited to France. The conditions in UK detention centres are just as bad suffering not only overcrowding, but high levels of physical assaults on detainees and racist and sexist taunts by staff members. This has led to a series of hunger strikes by detainees.

The problem with detention centres, however, is not how badly they are run but that they exist in the first place. The detention system needs to be shut down and we need to stop the racist myths that exist in order to allow the government to justify this inhumane incarceration.