Refugee Tales walk (Photo: Refugee Tales)This time last year, I joined the Refugee Tales collective of activists, volunteers, refugees and ex-detainees as they started a week-long pilgrimage along the North Downs Way from Dover to Crawley in solidarity with refugees. Walking with others always seems to invite storytelling, and as we traversed the Kent countryside in easy conversation, it seemed as though the borders that often divide people and places were temporarily lifted.
The week-long walk, with its evenings of storytelling and performance, is currently underway again, this time tracing a route from Canterbury to Westminster. This year, under the cloud of a referendum fought largely on the issue of immigration and that UKIP poster which seemed to put our shared values into question, it is more important than ever.
This year the event began with a ‘day of thought performance and action’ on the issue of indefinite immigration detention. Working to end detention is a central plank of the Refugee Tales project and arises from the tireless work of the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, and Anna Pincus, a co-founder of the project. The good news is, as Jerome Phelps noted in his introduction to the issues at the beginning of the day, that this is a fight that’s making progress. As well as the successful legal challenge to end the Detained Fast Track system, led by his organisation Detention Action, two Immigration Removal Centres have been closed in the past year, and controversial plans for the expansion of Campsfield have been dropped. It remains the case, however, that the UK is the only country in Europe (still, just) that has no time limit on immigration detention. This means that unlike the prison system, detainees are not given a release date. Most IRCs are run by private security companies, whose profit driven management means that detainees face daily infringements on their health and wellbeing. Over the course of the day, we heard from a number of ex-detainees whose accounts of daily life inside these highly secretive institutions painted a picture of a dehumanised, and dehumanising, system.
