Yarl's Wood Detention Centre. Photo: Aliya Mirza/Women 4 Refugee WomenUntil July 2015, the UK was responsible for the largest-scale systematic detention of asylum-seekers in Europe. Any asylum-seeker whose claim was considered by the Home Office ‘suitable for a quick decision’ was taken straight to a high-security detention centre, usually Harmondsworth or Yarl’s Wood. Locked up in a cell, subject to draconian deadlines, the vast majority were quickly refused asylum, and quickly removed.
As I have previously described, it was a system that worked for the Home Office. There was no will to examine whether its manifest flaws were depriving asylum-seekers of justice. For twelve years, people from some of the most dangerous countries on earth were detained, refused asylum and, in short order, sent back.
This came to an end last July. The Court of Appeal upheld the legal challenge by my organisation, Detention Action, finding that the process was ‘systemically unfair and unjust’. The Home Office conceded a second case, brought by individual survivors of torture and trafficking, admitting that it had unfairly imposed the Fast Track on them. The Immigration Minister James Brokenshire had little option but to suspend the process.
