Women starve for their basic humanity in IRCs (New Internationalist) (15 March 2018)

A number of detainees at Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre (IRC) have been on a collective hunger strike since 21 February in protest against inhumane conditions they experience whilst detained. As a human rights and asylum solicitor and Director of public law and immigration, Toufique Hossain has seen the dire conditions his clients are forced to live in inside IRCs across the UK. He has spoken out about the £1 hour wages for the skilled work provided by detainees as akin to slavery and warns that the majority of women detained are fleeing from sexual violence, as part of forced prostitution as a result of trafficking or due to rape or sexual persecution. The very fact that these vulnerable individuals are detained is against the Home Office’s Adults at Risk policy which is supposed to protect these vulnerable asylum seekers from re-traumatisation within detention. The women on hunger strike ask for an end to indefinite detention – the UK is the only country in Europe which does not have a cap on detention – an end to the detention of vulnerable individuals, and a stop to the £1 hour wages for skilled workers. Toufique points out: “They are made to feel like liars or criminals,” he says. “We say it should be up to the Home Office to do proper checks to see who has been subject to sexual violence.” However detainee, Theresa, fled Uganda for fear of sexual persecution as a gay woman and has been told that the Home Office require proof of her sexuality which is something so has been unable to do, which is why she is still held and remains on hunger strike.