According to British shadow home secretary Diane Abbott, women being held at the Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre feel desperate at being kept there indefinitely. Ms Abbott and shadow attorney general Shami Chakrabarti were given access to view the site in Bedfordshire which holds up to 410 detainees and to speak to residents. They visited as approximately 120 women are staging a hunger strike over sub par conditions and an end to their indefinite detention.
The visit took more than one year to organise according to Ms Abbott who had at first been told that she would not be able to speak to detainees during her tour. On her arrival however women crowded her in the corridors wanting to tell her about their situation. Staff from Serco – the company contracted to run the centre – made a sports hall available so she could talk to a group of around 30. One woman said she had lived in the UK for 30 years, had five British children and had been detained for seven months, pending removal to Nigeria, a country where she no longer has any family.
Ms Chakrabarti was concerned by the poor legal advice available to detainees. The women told her that a hunger strike had began on Wednesday although representatives from Serco have denied this claim.
Following a 2017 inspection of Yarl’s Wood, a report by the chief inspector of prisons said increasing numbers of women were being detained at the facility despite evidence that they were victims of torture, rape and trafficking. Further, the fact that two-thirds of the women at the centre were released rather than deported after a period of detention has raised questions about the justification for detention in the first place.
A Home Office spokesperson has denied that women are being kept indefinitely and claimed instead that they are held for the minimum time possible and their detention is reviewed on a regular basis.
Ms Abbott and Ms Chakrabarti were accompanied by Home Office staff, Serco staff and members of G4S which provides healthcare.
