The Financial Times and others have reported that the Home Secretary asked officials to look into the idea of offshore asylum processing on Ascension Island, an isolated volcanic British territory, and on St Helena, 800 miles away, before ruling it out.
However, Downing Street has reportedly refused to rule out using locations closer to home, including Scottish islands, for processing asylum seekers.
There’s also been talk of using private companies to interview and assess each individual claim for asylum.
These are disturbing developments designed to further remove public scrutiny from the treatment of refugees in the U.K.
It’s a dream for outsourcing companies wanting to eliminate embarrassing and shameful stories about their human rights abuses.
By taking asylum seekers offshore they can control 100% what we see and hear about the treatment of refugees under their “care”.
We already don’t hear much about the day to day treatment of asylum seekers held in Dungavel or other asylum detention centres. These places are deliberately cut off from the rest of society. They are difficult to access. The people inside are institutionalised and frightened. Complaints about conditions, self harm incidents and even deaths are easily suppressed.
FOI requests about self harm and deaths have never been more important. Of course people die every day, and no one mentions their name, but there is a public interest when these deaths occur under the “care” of the Home Office or its subcontractors. Mercy Baguma’s death is one such case that was highlighted because of the circumstances of her death, namely her baby being left for days in his cot while she died. Mercy’s death could have gone under the radar because no public agency – not Police Scotland or the Home Office or Mears – mentioned her passing. Purely by coincidence, Positive Action in Housing pieced together her story and its relevance to the public interest. When you take refugees offshore, it’s easy to dehumanise, skip the detail, not mention deaths or self harm, and put asylum seekers out of sight and out of mind while profiteers continue to profit.
Each and every asylum seeker accommodated by outsourcing companies is a potential embarrassment to their corporate image and an inconvenience to their for-profit motive. People who can’t speak out or have their voice heard become relatively trouble free for outsourcing companies – like parcels being shipped for profit.
In Glasgow, our housing and homelessness team continues to see firsthand how people’s human rights are being abused and overlooked. There is no attempt to provide information about people’s rights. Each question from the press about individual cases is treated with a swift rebuttal or attempts are made to distance their involvement from the story as in Mercy’s case. They are crowded in hotels (in a pandemic) without care, and even after they leave hotels to move into accommodation they are too fearful to complain in case it jeopardises their asylum status. All of this toxic mix conspires to reduce public scrutiny and hide the real extent of human rights abuses in the U.K. asylum system. This is the new frontier for human rights and anti racist campaigns: out of sight, out of mind.
Robina Qureshi
Patel is expected to address the issue of Channel crossings by refugees in a speech to the Conservative party conference on Sunday, and has repeatedly vowed to stop those arriving in the country by boat. She has called on the Royal Navy to help tackle the growing number of small boats and appointed a former Royal Marine, Dan O’Mahoney, to the role of “clandestine Channel threat commander”. In August she said the number of crossings was “appalling and unacceptably high”, adding: “I am working to make this route unviable.” The UK is dealing with record levels of arrivals across the Channel, and – according to PA Media analysis – nearly 7,000 people have landed in the UK by small boats this year. New plans drawn up by the Home Office show that people could be housed in a detention centre criticised for inhumane conditions, and Conservative MPs in Kent have raised concerns about the housing of migrants in nearby hotels and army barracks. Ascension Island, which has a population of less than 1,000, is home to a Royal Air Force station and was used extensively as a staging point by the British military during the Falklands conflict in 1982. St Helena is also one of the most isolated islands in the world, lying 1,210 miles off the west coast of Africa. It is part of the British Overseas Territory of St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha.