UK/US Asylum Seekers Find Death, Abuse, and Criminal Indifference

Also posted at The Public Record

An article in the March 14 UK Observer reports that United Kingdom's asylum immigration system is systematically denying claims of torture by asylum applicants, despite ample medical evidence by applicants of torture in their home countries. Since 2001, many asylum applicants have been sent to prison, with murderers and rapists, despite the fact they have never broken any law, making Britain the only European Union country to have such a practice.

Sonya Sceats, a spokeswoman for one charity that carries out medical assessments for the government, told the Observer: "It's very clear there is a systemic and increasing problem here. The corollary of their dismissal of independent medical evidence is that the protection [asylum] claim is invariably rejected and this means a survivor of torture is at risk of being returned to further torture or at risk of detention."

The allegations come in the wake of strong criticism last week of the UK Border Agency, which was condemned for failing to investigate claims of mistreatment by failed asylum seekers in abuse allegations up to July 2008. Ministers now plan to review the use of force against asylum seekers by British security guards after a Border Agency report on abuse conceded that serious injuries were suffered by detainees who had been handcuffed or physically restrained.

Such claims of mistreatment by asylum applicants, imprisoned by the British government, despite proof of torture, include a Zimbabwean woman, currently on hunger strike at Yarl's Wood detention center, Bedfordshire, who had been raped and beaten in Zimbabwe, and still bears copious scars of the multiple stabbings on both arms. She also alleges racist abuse by the British prison guards. A Congolese woman, who also had suffered multiple rapes and beatings in her home country, "claimed to have suffered "medical abuse" and had anxiety attacks after witnessing a naked woman dragged from her room in Yarl's Wood by private security guards, claims robustly denied by the Home Office."

"Everybody was shocked," she said. "She had no clothes on and she was photographed. I still get flashbacks."

The story follows a UK Guardian report from last week, when three Kosovo nationals leaped to their deaths from a Glascow apartment building. The Kosovoan nationals -- two men and one woman -- were asylum applicants who had their claims of asylum rejected from the UK government. [See Update/Correction at end of this posting.]

The level of desperation, as well as abuse, suffered by UK asylum seekers was documented in an Institute of Race Relations (IRR) report in September 2006, Driven to Desperate Measures (PDF).

THE IRR has catalogued a roll call of death of the 221 asylum seekers and migrants who have died either in the UK or attempting to reach the UK in the past seventeen years.*

97 died taking dangerous and highly risky methods to enter the country. With legal barriers in place to prevent them securing visas or work permits to enter legally and sanctions applying to above-board carriers, the desperate stow away on planes and lorries or attempt to cross the channel in makeshift boats or cling to trains. The number recorded here is probably only a fraction of those who have died in this way. Our figures rely on news reports and by virtue of the subject matter these deaths are not news.

70 died as an indirect consequence of the iniquities of the immigration/asylum system - either by taking their own lives when claims were not allowed, or by meeting accidental deaths evading deportation, or during the deportation itself, or by being prevented medical care, through becoming destitute in the UK.

Of these:

- 57 died at their own hand, preferring this to being returned to the country they fled, when asylum claims were turned down. And compounding the process is the fact that some of those in detention and known to be traumatised and particularly vulnerable appear not to have been provided with the medical (especially psychiatric) support they needed.

- 4 died accidentally as, in terror at what they presumed to be the arrival of deportation officials, they took evasive action.

- 1 person died during the deportation process itself, when she was asphyxiated as officers used 13 feet of tape to subdue and quieten her.

- 2 people died after being deported back to a country where they feared for their safety. The actual number is certainly far higher.

- 5 people died because of being denied healthcare for preventable medical problems.

- 1 person died destitute and unable to access services.

4 died in prison, police or psychiatric custody, where racist stereotypes appeared to induce the use of reckless control and restraint methods or where there appeared to be medical neglect.

32 died in the course of carrying out work, which, by virtue of its being part of the 'black economy' carried particular dangers and few protective rights. (The numbers listed here are probably a gross underestimate, as work-related deaths of people who are 'illegal' will often go unreported in the media.)

18 died on the streets of our cities at the hands of racists or as a consequence of altercations with a racial dimension. Often the victims had been moved, via the government's dispersal system, to areas where they were particularly isolated and vulnerable to attack.

Great Britain is not alone in treating asylum seekers with injustice. In the United States, the selection of the administrative judges who rule on asylum cases has been politicized, with dire results. In a Stanford Law Review article a few years back, "Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication", after studying hundreds of thousands of asylum cases decided by asylum officers, immigration judges, the Board of Immigration Appeal and the U.S. Courts of Appeal, the study found "significant disparities in grant rates, even when different adjudicators in the same office each considered large numbers of applications from nationals of the same country."

As in the UK, not much has changed in the United States as well, with over a quarter of all immigration judges appointed during the Bush-Cheney years. But even before that, a San Jose Mercury News investigation in 2000 found vast disparities in the way asylum applicants were treated by the system. As a report by VisaLaw explained it:

The study... reveals what many instinctively knew about the asylum process – that whether a person is granted asylum depends less on the merits of the person’s case and more on the judge before whom they present their case. The paper examined 176,465 cases that came before the 219 Immigration Judges between 1995 and 1999.

Some judges granted asylum in half of the cases they heard, while other judges granted asylum in less than two percent of cases. Some judges even routinely deny asylum to applicants from countries such as Bosnia and Somalia, where conditions mean that most applicants are granted asylum.

Situation Scandalous in the United States

Of course, like Great Britain, the United States imprisons some of their asylum applicants, many of them torture victims, in public and private prisons throughout the country. Approximately 50,000 asylum seekers were placed in penal detention in the United States from 2003 to 2009. Detention retraumatizes the tortured, and prevents the asylum applicant from making a proper case for their claims. As a Human Rights First study (PDF) in 2009 explained it:

Six years after DHS and its interior immigration enforcement component, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (known as “ICE”) took over responsibility for immigration detention, the U.S. system for detaining asylum seekers is more flawed than ever.... In 2007 alone, more than 10,000 asylum seekers were newly detained in the United States. They are held in facilities that are actual jails or are operated like jails. They are often brought in handcuffs and sometimes shackles to these facilities, where they wear prison uniforms, are guarded by officers in prison attire, visit with family and friends only through glass barriers, and have essentially no freedom of movement within the facilities. The cost of detaining these asylum seekers over the past six years has exceeded $300 million. During that time, ICE parole policies have become more restrictive, and parole rates for asylum seekers dropped from 41.3 percent in 2004 to 4.2 percent in 2007. ICE has not provided Congressionally-mandated statistics—detailing the number of asylum seekers detained, the length of their detention, and the rates of their release—in a timely or complete manner. The U.S. detention system for asylum seekers, which lacks crucial safeguards, is inconsistent with international refugee protection and human rights standards.

Those who flee torture, rape, and political or social persecution and seek protection in another country are among the most vulnerable population on the planet. The HRF report in particular documents the punitive policy of ICE towards torture victims:

Previously, it was ICE policy to “favor release of aliens who have been granted protection by an immigration judge” when the decision was being appealed by the government. However, the new parole directive issued by ICE in November 2007 rescinded prior parole guidelines— including this guidance.

Even when ICE is not appealing an immigration judge’s ruling, some refugees and other immigrants who have been found eligible for other forms of protection have been detained for several additional months. For example, some individuals who were granted relief under the Convention Against Torture—because they had shown that they were more likely than not to be victims of torture if returned to their home countries—were detained by ICE for an additional 90 days even after the judge granted them relief. Attorneys in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota report that this is “often” the case in their areas. In Arizona and Florida, individuals who were determined by the U.S. to be “refugees” and were granted “withholding of removal”—and who therefore cannot be returned to the country in which they fear persecution— have also sometimes been detained for up to an additional 90 days.

Meanwhile, over 90 immigration detainees have died since ICE took over administration of the system in 2003, at least a dozen of them suicides.

Something is very wrong with a country when it treats its least powerful, most vulnerable members in such a disgraceful way. But what we hear from politicians in the UK and the United States is more often jingoistic and racist invective against "immigrants", and the population as a whole either turns away from this issue, poisoned with prejudice, or simply are ignorant of the stories of these individuals who live in their midst, but are hardly ever reported.

As a conclusion, I ask readers to consider just two stories from the HRF report, describing this terrible tragedy enacted every day by the U.S. government:

A Colombian refugee, who had been jailed, beaten, and tortured for participating in a political demonstration in Colombia, was detained in a U.S. immigration jail in Arizona for 14 months, including for over eight months after an Immigration Judge had ruled that he was eligible for asylum. The ICE attorney who had argued against the refugee’s asylum request appealed the judge’s decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals. ICE refused to release the asylum seeker while the appeal was pending. ICE denied his request for parole, even though the man had both a U.S. citizen daughter and a U.S. citizen father. He was finally released after eight additional months in detention, over two weeks after the Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed the judge’s decision granting him asylum.

* * * *

A Sri Lankan fisherman, who was a victim of kidnapping by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), was detained for 30 months in the United States while ICE opposed his request for asylum on the ground that his payment of his ransom consisted “material support” to the armed group. When he was finally released from detention pending a decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals, he was placed into a restrictive supervision program. He was fitted with an ankle bracelet and initially required to report on a monthly basis. Eventually, this was reduced to in-person reporting every six months. After nearly two years of compliance with all reporting requirements, following his 30 months of detention, the fisherman is still required to wear a large ankle bracelet and is subject to home visits.

Correction/Update:

This story reported that the suicides of three individuals in Glasgow were Kosovo nationals. Later reports have identified the individuals who died in the leap off the 15th story of an apartment building as Serguei Serykh, 43, his wife Tatiana and Mr. Serykh's adult stepson. A BBC story on March 13 said the family had previously been granted political asylum in Canada, but had left after an some kind of dispute with authorities there. They had recently been denied an application for asylum in the UK, and on the day they died had received a letter that they would lose their apartment, although no order for removal had yet been filed. Extrapolating from a Globe and Mail report on March 10, it appears possible that Mr. Serykh suffered from a serious mental illness.

The suicides of these desperate individuals have brought organized protests in Scotland, with marchers calling for an end to the "enforced removal of refugee families," according to the BBC report. A later article by the UK Guardian quotes the director of the Glasgow charity Positive Action in Housing, Robina Qureshi, as saying the family's death could not be attributed to psychological issues, but UK asylum policy. "The Serykhs were considered credible in Canada," Qureshi said. "Shouldn't that be good enough for us? They were going to be out on the street, destitute. What would that do to your mental state?"

Pass the Torture Victims Relief Act

The Torture Victims Relief Act (TVRA), HR-1511, first passed in 1998, authorizes funding to support torture treatment programs in the U.S. and abroad. With the continued practice of torture in over 100 countries, and the recent surge in political will to denounce torture, it is a crucial time for the U.S. to reaffirm its commitment to treatment for torture victims, both at home and oveseas.

American centers have been reporting increasing numbers of asylum seekers in need of services, and the U.S. has recently committed to resettle an increased number of Iraqi refugees over the next few years (though still a pittance, compared to the millions displaced by the Iraq war and occupation). The recession has made things extremely difficult for these new refugees. It has also seriously impacted victim rehab centers in the U.S. and overseas, with cutbacks in staff and services, and, in some cases, closing their doors.

The bill has been referred to the House Foreign Affairs and House Energy and Commerce committees. Please call your Congressperson and ask them to reauthorize TVRA in 2009 and appropriate the funds at authorized levels. You will be doing something concrete to help those tortured abroad who, despite the torture scandal that envelops this country right now, have come to the U.S. seeking refuge and safety from oppression and torture in countries as diverse as Guatemala, Philippines, Bosnia, Russia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Burma (Mynamar), Yemen, and many, many more.

Poisoning the Asylum Well

Charlie Savage has an article in today's New York Times focusing on the politicization of the civil service process that selects the nation's immigration judges. The use of a political litmus test for the conservatism of Department of Justice applicants surfaced last summer in

... two scathing reports confirming that for several years administration officials illegally took political affiliation into account when hiring recent law school graduates, summer associates, some assistant prosecutors and immigration judges.

The culprits in this twisted, and illegal, vetting process were the assistant to the Attorney General, Kyle Sampson, and two former White House flunkies, Monica Goodling and Jan Williams. The story about the disparities in adjudication of asylum cases surfaced in a Stanford Law Review report last Spring (which I covered at the time.)

The latest revelations from the DoJ reviews amplify the conclusions re the bias and unfairness of the nation's immigration courts, as revealed in the Stanford study earlier this year.

According to Savage:

When vetting applicants... Ms. Goodling asked them questions about their political beliefs and researched their campaign contributions. She also conducted Internet searches of their names and words like “asylum,” “immigrant” and “border,” as well as partisan terms, like abortion, Iraq, gay and the names of political figures, to determine their views, the report said.

No evidence of a deliberate attempt to limit asylum claims has surfaced. But a statistical analysis of the results of the new Bush appointees asylum decisions found a significant discrepancy between the judgments of the "vetted" Bush Administration post-2004 appointees and the rest of the immigration judges or hearing examiners in the system. (The statistics were not gathered by DoJ, but by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.)

Of the 31 politically selected judges, 16 compiled enough of a record to allow statistical analysis. Nine rejected applicants at a significantly higher rate than other local colleagues, while three were more lenient....

And when asylum denial rates of all judges across the nation were ranked in comparison to their local peers, 8 of the 16 scored above the 70th percentile — meaning they have been among the judges least likely to grant asylum.

Together, these 16 judges handled 5,031 cases and had a combined denial rate of 66.3 percent — 6.6 percentage points greater than their collective peers. This translates into an extra 157 asylum cases that resulted in denial. [Emphasis added]

What happens when an asylum case is rejected? Some are appealed, of which a small percentage are referred back to the original court for retrial. But a majority of individuals are deported back to their countries, which they originally left because of political or national persecution, often because they were imprisoned, tortured or threatened with death.

How many of these 157 extra denials resulted in torture or death of the individuals involved? We cannot know, but given the state of world governance and the prevalence of torture in many countries, the answer must be that the result of some this political vetting has been imprisonment, renewed torture, or hideous death.

The NYT article notes that unfairness is rife throughout the asylum-immigration system, and different standards and approval rates by judges throughout the system is a scandal still left unaddressed.

Asylum seekers are an easy target for right-wing politicians, and other opportunistic politicos, both Democratic and Republican, who seek to scapegoat these defenseless victims for the difficulties and pressures of the immigration problems in the U.S. as a whole. Americans don't realize how difficult it is to get asylum in the United States. Grant rates for male applicants are only 37.3%, and are often made only after voluminous perusal of mountains of evidence, usually involving hundreds of pages of evidence, submitted by the applicant (who is often severely stressed, if not depressed, or suffering from PTSD from torture or war-related conflict).

Congress must address reform of the asylum immigration system as a matter of basic human rights. Systemic effects of the unfair system are also burdening the federal judicial system as a whole, as appeals courts are flooded by applicants, denied a fair hearing, or victimized by judicial rulings that are unprofessional, biased, or inept. As one reporter described it:

Federal judges have been among the harshest critics of immigration judges. For example, last year the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals delivered another in a series of stinging rebukes to the immigration courts and Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). It ordered a review of a case of a Lebanese who was denied asylum despite fear that he would be persecuted if forced to return to his home country. The Appeals Court called for the DOJ to allocate more resources to ensure that immigrants receive fair review of their cases.

Responsible plans for basic reform are on the record. But only when the public at large begins to make itself heard on this issue will politicians finally discover the "will" to make change happen.

Last June, I wrote:

Immigration has been the issue most beloved of demagogues, appealing as it does to nativism, fears of unemployment and jingoistic campaigns for buying only domestic products ("put the foreign workers out of work!"). The Democratic Party, backed by the parochial and conservative trade union bureaucracy, has often bought into the protectionist scam, which pits U.S. workers against their brothers and sisters around the world. And the worst victims have been, of course, the most powerless -- the men, women, and children fleeing for their lives to the U.S., asking for political asylum. As the studies reported above show, the United States has long since ceased standing for justice and fairness.

We must demand that political litmus tests for immigration judges be stopped, and their proponents fined and jailed.... the Immigration Appeals Board must be reconstituted and strengthened, and judges in the immigration courts (now run by the Department of Homeland Security) monitored and held accountable for discriminatory practices.

Another Perspective: Torture by Other Countries

Sometimes I wonder, as this is a blog dedicated to exposing and reforming the use of torture by the U.S. government, whether readers of this blog realize to what a great extent torture is practiced by countries other than the United States. The fact is that torture is practiced by many other countries. A websearch turns up the following from InformationPlease.com:

According to Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org), the use of torture was documented in the following countries in 2004 and 2005: China, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Malaysia, Morocco, Nepal, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Uganda, and Uzbekistan.

Amnesty International's Annual Report for 2008 lists many other countries where torture and other human rights violations occur on a not irregular basis. These include, among others, Myanmar (Burma), Sudan, Belarus, and Afghanistan (where "violations of international humanitarian and human rights law were committed with impunity by all parties, including Afghan and international security forces and insurgent groups," and where U.S. coalition forces continue to turn over prisoners to the Afghan National Directorate of Security, "despite allegations of torture and other ill-treatment by the NDS".)

One country worth examining in a bit more depth is Egypt, as it exemplifies the effects of an out of control use of torture upon the civil life of a society. A Human Rights Watch article in February 2005 reported:

Human Rights Watch interviewed several former detainees who provided credible accounts of torture they underwent at the hands of SSI [State Security Investigation service] interrogators. Others spoke of seeing fellow detainees who had been badly tortured, and hearing the screams of those being abused. Given that those most likely to have been tortured are among the hundreds if not thousands of persons still in detention, and that many of those released fear the possible consequences of meeting with independent human rights monitors, Human Rights Watch believes that torture and ill-treatment by the SSI has been widespread in connection with the investigations into the Taba attacks. [The Taba attacks concerned a terrible series of bombings of tourist areas, including the Taba Hilton hotel in near the Egyptian-Israeli border in October 2004.]

A HRW "briefing paper" a year earlier described the terrible cost torture had wrought upon Egyptian society:

Torture in Egypt is a widespread and persistent phenomenon. Security forces and the police routinely torture or ill-treat detainees, particularly during interrogation. In most cases, officials torture detainees to obtain information and coerce confessions, occasionally leading to death in custody. In some cases, officials use torture detainees to punish, intimidate, or humiliate. Police also detain and torture family members to obtain information or confessions from a relative, or to force a wanted relative to surrender.

While torture in Egypt has typically been used against political dissidents, in recent years it has become epidemic, affecting large numbers of ordinary citizens who find themselves in police custody as suspects or in connection with criminal investigations. The Egyptian authorities do not investigate the great majority of allegations of torture despite their obligation to do so under Egyptian and international law. In the few cases where officers have been prosecuted for torture or ill-treatment, charges were often inappropriately lenient and penalties inadequate. This lack of effective public accountability and transparency has led to a culture of impunity.

The other countries that practice torture are not always outside Western Europe. Great Britain scandalously tortured IRA prisoners at Long Kesh internment camp in the 1960s-1970s, utilizing techniques such as hooding, sensory deprivation, and isolation that are remarkably similar to those practiced by the United States, as revealed in recent exposes the past five years or so. In the early 1960s, the French were charged with hideous use of torture against Algerian "insurgents".

The U.S. State Department produces Reports on Human Rights of many countries around the world -- I often utilize these reports when doing research on U.S. asylum applicants for my work -- and despite some shortcomings, the State Department reports often document human rights violations, including torture, in many countries around the world. Furthermore, they document the tremendous legal and reporting difficulties experienced by workers of NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations] in those countries when they seek to expose or remedy these wrongs, including harassment, jailing, even disappearances of such workers.

It's important to note that despite its faults and its struggles the United States remains a country where, even if it is difficult to penetrate the mass media on this subject, journalists, bloggers, NGO organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, etc. do not experience this kind of heavy-handed governmental oppression, at least not as a normal occurrence. And then, too, despite the paucity of coverage in the U.S. press, as readers of this blog know, some important coverage does occur here, coverage that is essential in providing much of what we know about the fight against torture. Furthermore, it seems that within the military and even the intelligence agencies, there are those individuals who do not go along with the misuse of interrogation practices at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Alberto Mora is one such individual who comes to mind. Retired Major General Antonio Taguba is another.

Hence, it was an international embarrassment when some months back an internal training manual developed by the Canadian foreign affairs department labeled the United States as a country where foreigners risked torture, relying on reports of maltreatment in the U.S. prison at Guatanamo, Abu Ghraib, and "black site" prisons. The U.S. protested, and the Canadian government made moves to remove the U.S. from such a list.

The United States is also a major destination for torture victims seeking asylum from around the world. I know. I've worked personally with a fair number of these victims. While the U.S. has tightened the procedures for gaining asylum in the U.S., making them too restrictive, many thousands still find refuge in this country, sometimes from the very countries that remain U.S. allies, some of which have also been harshly criticized by the same State Department reports noted above. Making matters even stranger, many asylum refugees are torture victims fleeing the same countries to which the U.S. sent foreign prisoners in the "war on terror" via "extraordinary rendition", where they then experienced torture (such as Maher Ahar). The entire situation is so irrational, it almost seems invented by a madman trying to confuse any reasonable person into a state of insensibility.

The fight against torture is a world-wide struggle. One major outcome of that political fight was solidified with the production of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, to which the U.S. is a signatory. (The U.S. ratified the CAT with a number of reservations that unfortunately complicate the enforcement of the CAT when it concerns U.S. possible violations.)

As a statement on Worldwide Torture by Human Rights Watch puts it:

This is a critical time to insist on revelation of the full extent of torture and related abuses by U.S. authorities and to press for prosecution of those responsible. It is also a critical time to press other governments, many of which have been quick to condemn the U.S. for its actions at Abu Ghraib, to investigate and prosecute torture and mistreatment in their own holding cells, detention facilities, and prisons.

Support the Detainee Basic Medical Care Act of 2008

An action alert from Physicians for Human Rights:

We urge you to write your Senators and Representative today to support the Detainee Basic Medical Care Act of 2008.

Shocking exposés this week by the New York Times, Washington Post, and 60 Minutes have confirmed the alarming breakdown in health care for detained asylum seekers and other immigrants in custody of the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), resulting in needless suffering and, in the most tragic cases, avoidable death.

The Detainee Basic Medical Care Act would help to prevent these tragedies by requiring the government to protect the rights and well-being of asylum seekers and others held in immigration prisons throughout the United States.

Please take action now in support of humane treatment and the right to health care of asylum seekers and other immigration detainees....

If you know of currently or previously detained asylum seekers who received inadequate health care in detention, please let us know as soon as you can by emailing Jennie Baldé at jbalde@phrusa.org.

Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein are reporting the story at the Washington Post:

The most vulnerable detainees, the physically sick and the mentally ill, are sometimes denied the proper treatment to which they are entitled by law and regulation. They are locked in a world of slow care, poor care and no care, with panic and coverups among employees watching it happen, according to a Post investigation.

The investigation found a hidden world of flawed medical judgments, faulty administrative practices, neglectful guards, ill-trained technicians, sloppy record-keeping, lost medical files and dangerous staff shortages. It is also a world increasingly run by high-priced private contractors. There is evidence that infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and chicken pox, are spreading inside the centers.

Federal officials who oversee immigration detention said last week that they are "committed to ensuring the safety and well-being" of everyone in their custody.

Some 83 detainees have died in, or soon after, custody during the past five years. The deaths are the loudest alarms about a system teetering on collapse.

I once had an asylum detainee as a psychotherapy patient. I can tell you he suffered tremendously from poor health care at the center where he was held: poor access to doctors or medications; misdiagnosis; jailors who saw most ill detainees as complainers at best, or malingerers at worst -- and this patient was lucky, as he did not have a life-threatening illness. Something must be done!

Support PHR's campaign and take action now.