Detention conditons at Heathrow airport criticised
Two reports published by the UK Chief Inspector of Prisons after an unannounced visit reveal poor detention conditions and several possibly unlawful practices at Heathrow airport’s short-term detention facilities in Terminal 3 and Terminal 4.
The reports raise concerns about detention conditions over longer periods, since no beds are available. Furthermore, the staff is predominantly male even though one third of the detainees at Terminal 3 and a quarter at Terminal 4 are women. The reports also criticise the staff’s inadequate knowledge of the referral system for identifying victims of human trafficking and the very limited access of detainees to legal advice. Questions were also raised on the legality of the detention of children and how they are registered. For instance, a European child who was accompanying his Syrian father, was detained but listed as a visitor, and thus not accounted for in data on child detention.
According to Clare Sambrook of End Child Detention Now, such findings raise “discomfiting questions”, such as the level of care and safety given to victims of trafficking if the staff doesn’t know how to identify and refer them, or the number of children detained but “misleadingly listed as ‘visitors’”.
The Chief Inspector of Prisons issued a long list of recommendations to the UK Border Agency and to the facilities and escort contractors, aiming to improve conditions in the Terminals. Recommendations range from using more “appropriate and sensitive approaches to managing and addressing people being removed” to better implementing basic reception standards such as separation of men and women, use of family rooms, and distribution of adequate food and drinks. The reports also recommends offering detainees information in a language they can understand and respecting detainees’ right to a free phone call.
Heathrow’s facilities are used to hold people arriving in the UK who have been denied entry or are detained pending further enquiries and people subjected to deportation orders. Already in 2007, Anne Owers, Chief Inspector of Prisons, had criticised the detention conditions in Terminal 4 and the Queen’s building, considering them generally inadequate.
