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UK: Detention centre disturbance

01 July 1994

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The troubled new immigration and asylum detention centre outside Oxford, Campsfield, was shaken again in June when detainees staged rooftop protests and damaged cells and fittings, after a series of incidents of allegedly contemptuous and brutal behaviour towards detainees. Eight detainees escaped during the disturbances, in which several asylum-seekers were hurt when 150 riot police fought to regain control. Campsfield, which opened to house 200 asylum-seekers and immigration detainees in November 1993, has been the site of almost non-stop protest. Over Christmas it housed 100 Jamaican visitors detained en masse on suspicion of wanting to overstay; in March a hunger strike started there and spread to encompass over 200 asylum-seekers in prisons all over the country. It was the restrictions imposed after the hunger strikes that led to the latest disturbances, according to the Campaign to Close Campsfield. At least two detainees who had been released following a hunger strike were re-arrested and deported following their public criticism of the policy of detaining asylum-seekers.

CARF no 21, July/August 1994

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