Most of the desperate mothers who are held at Yarl's Wood are quickly deported: now four of them are taking the Home Office to court, citing violations of their human rights amid nightmarish conditions. Mark Townsend reports
Mark Townsend The Observer, Sunday 11 April 2010 Article history
Reetha Suppiah was held at Yarls Wood Detention Centre. Photograph: Christopher Thomond / Guardian
The knock on the door came at dawn. Outside the modest terraced house in Bury, Lancashire, police and home office officials told Reetha Suppiah she was being deported to Malaysia, where she had been repeatedly beaten and tortured after rejecting an arranged marriage.
She remembers being "bundled into a white van with caged windows" and driven south for almost four hours. Then, just after 11am on 7 February, Suppiah and her two young children arrived at Yarl's Wood, the immigration detention centre at the centre of abuse allegations that are vehemently contested by the Home Office.
Most of the women who enter Yarl's Wood are held, then deported and never heard of again. But Suppiah's account of what happened that February morning could shape the future of Britain's detention policy. Her story forms a central component of a legal challenge to what her lawyers call the "inhumane and degrading" conditions experienced in Yarl's Wood, the only immigration centre to hold only women and children.
As the wider debate on immigration shifts to the front line of the election battlefield, a judicial review is to pit the claims of Suppiah and three other women against the government. Lawyers believe the outcome could transform the treatment of asylum seekers.
Suppiah had been inside Yarl's Wood for only a matter of minutes when she says officers forced her 22-month-old son, Emmanuel, to stand with his arms outstretched while they searched him, an act that his mother describes as "grossly disproportionate". She said: "He asked me, 'What have I stolen mummy?' I could not understand why they were treating my baby like this."
Suppiah, 36, had fled to England in January 2008 to safeguard her children after death threats from her relatives intensified following a campaign of what she describes as 10 years of unrelenting torture.
Inside Yarl's Wood, she noted a marked decline in the welfare of her two boys. Emmanuel began to lose weight and regularly vomited. Lawyers who met him on 23 February described him as a withdrawn child who cried frequently and did not smile. Suppiah, they noted, "wept constantly".
Her eldest son, Danahar, 12, related how a teacher at the centre's school told him he was in "prison" waiting to be sent back to his own country.
Within days of arrival, Emmanuel and Danahar contracted diarrhoea. Their mother says she had to ask three times before receiving antibiotics. Suppiah also claims medication for her pre-existing chest condition was confiscated when she arrived.
The family say they were locked in their room for long periods with staff free to enter without knocking. "Suppiah was afforded no privacy, and legal documents were not passed to her promptly," according to her lawyers.
After three weeks, Suppiah and her children were released, driven to nearby Bedford, handed train tickets and left to make their way back to Bury.
Lawyers say the family remain so traumatised by the experience that they show signs of being "tortured emotionally and physically".
Suppiah said: "We have been in a terrible state ever since; my sons keep crying and I am shaken. I came here because I thought it was a fair country. Now they say I overstayed, but we have no idea if we can stay or what the future holds."
In a sense, Suppiah and her family were lucky. There are far graver allegations contained in the documents that will be examined as part of the judicial review. They detail allegations of physical and racist abuse made by Suppiah's fellow litigants, Denise McNeil, Shaunice Bignall-Young and Sakinat Bello.
One of the women, McNeil, is no stranger to violence. Raised in Jamaica, two brothers and a sister were murdered in gangland feuds and she suffered 13 years of domestic abuse by her partner. Yarl's Wood was almost as bad.
Legal papers allege that McNeil was attacked by staff during an incident inside the centre on 8 February, the day after Suppiah's arrival. They claim she was "assaulted repeatedly and violently assaulted by a [named] officer, on one occasion so violently that she lost consciousness". Later, staff allegedly kicked her in a leg, already badly injured after being caught in gangland crossfire in Jamaica as a child.
Bignall-Young, 26, claims she was kicked in the face by an officer during the same incident. A senior UK Border Agency officer is said to have visited her the following day, where she revealed "severe bruising".
Their accounts are rejected by government officials, who say independent monitors and CCTV recorded the incidents and found nothing untoward.
McNeil has testified that officers stole £390 from her as she was held in isolation. Correspondence received by the Home Office claims: "Many officers in Yarl's Wood have sex with detainees and smoke in their rooms. The claimant has been forced to strip for search in an apparently arbitrary basis and has regularly been threatened and verbally abused by staff."
Bignall-Young, who arrived in London from Jamaica in 2000 after fleeing from a relative who was physically and sexually abusive, reveals how on one occasion she removed her clothes after Yarl's Wood staff ordered a search. A male officer allegedly filmed the incident and told a colleague recently arrived at the scene: "You'll be sorry you missed the breasts."
A week after being allegedly assaulted, McNeil was told her attempts to stay in the UK had failed.
The listing of ill-treatment claims goes on. McNeil said she spent the first night in a cell with no blanket. Bignall-Young has been separated from her six-year-old son since being sent to Yarl's Wood just before Christmas. Three days after the alleged assault, 11 February, she climbed on to a cupboard and attempted to hang herself using shoelaces.
She told the Observer: "I don't know what is happening and cannot bear to be separated from my child any longer. I am in complete limbo."
The Home Office maintains that all four have been found by judges to have no right to stay in the UK and "have attacked and abused our staff" while Bignall-Young and McNeil have criminal records. The women are adamant they will suffer harm – even death – if they are deported. McNeil, whose convictions include cannabis possession, is terrified of reprisals. Last year, social services travelled to Jamaica to interview her former partner. He said that her life would be in danger if she returned.
Last month, the High Court ruled that it would hear the women's claims, a development that means the Home Office will be obliged to demonstrate in open court how Yarl's Wood complies with the UK's obligation to asylum seekers and to defend the centre against charges that its treatment of asylum-seeking women and children constitutes a "systematic disregard for human dignity".
Lawyers maintain that the treatment of Suppiah and the other women breaches the European convention on human rights, including article three, which states that no one shall face "torture, punishment or inhuman or degrading treatment" or unlawful detention.
Jim Duffy, of Public Interest Lawyers, a law firm that specialises in human rights, said they hoped the judicial review could prompt an official inquiry into the allegations of "systemic ill-treatment" and end child detention in the UK.
He said: "Yarl's Wood is a stain on our international reputation and the government's tired excuses for it are becoming increasingly tenuous with every passing day."
The Home Office response has been unequivocal, rejecting all allegations as "unfounded" and vowing to "rigorously defend any allegations through the courts". A statement adds: "Yarl's Wood is a well run centre with highly professional and caring staff." But within the next few months, the High Court will be listening to Reetha Suppiah's side of the story.
ASYLUM FACTS
■ There were 25,670 asylum applications to the UK in 2008 compared with a peak of 84,130 in 2002. Nineteen out of every 100 applications are successful, according to the Home Office.
■ The UK was ranked 17th in the league table of industrialised countries for the number of asylum applications per head of population, according to the United Nations in 2008.
■ The weekly allowance for asylum seekers will be reduced from £42 to £35, a cut of nearly 20%, the UK Border Agency has revealed.
■ The Home Office detains around 1,000 asylum-seeking children with their families each year. Yarl's Wood has 405 beds, of which 284 are for single women and 121 for families.
■ A total of 1,271 children were held in detention last year, with 232 detained for more than a month.
