Wave of hunger strikes
01 March 1994
A wave of hunger strikes has swept through prisons and detention centres across Britain as asylum seekers protest against their detention, their inhuman treatment and deportations which have resulted in death.
Since the end of February, when ten north Africans were released from Pentonville after ten days of an indefinite hunger strike, the number of asylum seekers on hunger strike grew to over 200 in mid-March. Over 100 were held in Campsfield, the new immigration detention centre at Kidlington, outside Oxford, which opened in November and holds 200 detainees. There were hunger strikers too at other dedicated immigration detention centres at Haslar, near Portsmouth, and Harmondsworth, near Heathrow, as well as in prisons such as Pentonville. They included people from Asia, Africa and South America, who had transcended linguistic and political differences to take common action against their racist treatment.
The hunger strike has become a classic weapon of asylum-seekers protesting their detention - usually it is the only weapon they have. Most weeks in the year, any year, there will be a few isolated asylum seekers on hunger strike, or simply refusing food. The line between protest and despair is a fine one.
The recent strikes took place against the background of a threefold increase in the rate of detentions in the past six months, from 200 to over 700. Many detainees are held for months; one 19-year old has been detained at Feltham Young Offenders" Institution for over a year, and was recently refused bail despite support from prison officers, sureties who included a prison visitor, his mother's hospitalisation, and recognition by an immigration Tribunal that he and his family have suffered persecution in the country from which they came.
Parallel to the increase in the detention and refusal of asylum, the grant of exceptional leave to remain has been dramatically reduced since the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act came into force in August 1993, from 86% to 28% of those claiming asylum. As a result of these changes, far more asylum seekers are being expelled from Britain.
There is no monitoring of what happens to rejected asylum- seekers who are returned home. But recent reports from Zaire, Turkey and Algeria, from organisations such as UNHCR and Amnesty International, show that asylum-seekers from these countries at any rate cannot safely be returned there - yet the Home Office continues to return them. Four Algerian hunger-strikers were returned to Algeria in February - only to be returned to Britain when Algeria refused to accept them as they lacked identity papers.
The conditions of detention are grim, too. Judge Stephen Tumin, Chief Inspector of Prisons, confessed to "grave reservations about the appropriateness" of holding "distressed, despondent and in some cases desperate" asylum seekers in Pentonville prison. Up to 65 immigration prisoners are held in Pentonville at any one time. In a report released on 22 March he condemned Pentonville's health care centre as rundown, cramped, dirty and unfit for patients.
In the face of the recent wave of protests, the Home Office has resorted to its usual strategy of dispersal, and of punishing detainees in detention centres by moving them to prison. However, this time the strategy seems to have had the opposite effect to that intended, by fanning the flames of protest and spreading the strike to hitherto unaffected prisons. Thus it was reported towards the end of March that several of the prisoners at Winson Green had joined the asylum seekers sent from Campsfield in their hunger strike. Other solidarity actions included an open letter from 86 senior dons at Oxford University to the Prime Minister protesting that the detention of asylum-seekers is contrary to the spirit of the UN convention and pickets at Campsfield, Pentonville and outside the Home Office.
By Easter, however, the dispersal strategy, combined with simple exhaustion, took their toll<