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Free trade - free movement?

As part of the week of G8 actions, more than 1000 people protested at Dungavel Detention Centre (officially Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre) on 5 July against the detention of asylum seekers, in a demonstration organised by groups including the Glasgow Campaign to Welcome Refugees.
If we had found it difficult to get there, thanks to police road blocks and detours, how - asked Rosie Kane MSP - did it feel for asylum seekers seized from their homes, shoved into police vans, and driven for eight hours to this shabby house, surrounded by razor-wire-topped fencing, in the middle of nowhere? The detainees had been moved to other detention centres; it seemed unlikely they had been told why - that people had come to support them. Such arbitrary removal is not unusual: asylum seekers are frequently transferred between detention centres, as Amnesty International (AI) reported in June 2005, documenting the case of a woman who was transferred from the south of England to Dungavel only to be transferred back to England the following day.

Money moves, people don't

Unlike most of the G8 protests, the Dungavel gathering was not uniformly white: former detainees and asylum seekers spoke powerfully of their experiences from the platform (shared with several MSPs, trade unionists and support groups) while many refugee families, including children, took part in the demonstration.
The police presence was ridiculously heavy. Protestors had to navigate detours and a roadblock set up to search cars and buses. The eventual two-mile walk, including another Section 60 search, finally led through silent lines of police on either side of the road (and for a group of people wearing black there was a completely pointless cordon).

"Extreme concern"

Officially the government says that detention is used to prevent absconding, to establish identity, to remove people from the UK at the end of their asylum case and for making a decision on "straightforward" cases. Yet, many former detainees testified they had been detained for prolonged periods of time, many still awaiting the results of applications. Again, according to the government, the family unit at Dungavel is used only to detain those whose asylum applications have failed for a few days prior to removal; yet a former detainee with her one-year child spoke of her six months in detention.
Quarterly Home Office statistics give only the numbers detained on one particular day: on 25 December 2004, some 1,515 were detained. But, based on detainee detention coordination numbers, Amnesty suspects that upwards of 25,000 individuals were detained in 2004, some possibly just overnight and others for prolonged periods.

National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns,http://www.ncadc.org.uk; No Borders Network, http://www.noborder.org; Amnesty International, Seeking asylum is not a crime: detention of people who have sought asylum, June 2005; http://www.coe.int/T/E/Commissioner_H.R/Communication_Unit/CommDH(2005)6_E.doc

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