QARN campaign for immigration detention time limit
Write to your MP
The Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN) is campaigning for a time limit for immigration detention.
In the year to the end of March 2014, 2,991 people were in detention in the United Kingdom, a rise of five per cent on the previous year.
In the same period, 29,801 people left detention. The majority, sixty-one per cent, had been detained for less than twenty-nine days, nineteen per cent for between twenty-nine days and two months and fourteen per cent for between two and four months.
Of the remaining 1,856 (six per cent), 175 had been in detention for between one and two years and thirty-nine for two or more years.
The decision to detain is not made by a judge, and is not part of a criminal sentence. It is arbitrary, said QARN, and men and women may be detained indefinitely.
Under the present British law no one may be held in prison without charge for longer than twenty eight days. There is, however, no limit to the length of time that people can be held under the 1971 Immigration Act. QARN wants to see this changed.
‘We feel that immigration detention is neither right nor necessary but, until such time as it ends QARN, with many others, is asking for a twenty-eight day time limit for immigration detention,’ QARN member Bridget Walker, of Oxford and Swindon Area Meeting, told the Friend.
The group is asking Friends to raise the issue with their MPs. A template letter is available from the QARN website.
