Public Law Solicitors

On 17 May, Patrick Page and Nicholas Hughes of the Harrow Public Law Team, spoke to students at Oxford University about challenging unlawful policies and practices in immigration detention.

The event began with a screening of the BBC Panorama documentary on Brook House immigration detention centre, which was aired in September 2017. The exposé shows footage of detainees being verbally and physically abused by detention staff.

After the screening, Nicholas spoke about Duncan Lewis’s challenge to the Home Office’s failure to instigate an independent, judicial and public inquiry into the abuse. The challenge is being brought on behalf of ‘Abbas’, a young Egyptian detainee who is seen being strangled by a detention officer in the BBC exposé. Permission to bring this challenge to the High Court was granted on Tuesday 22 May.

Patrick then discussed our recent successful challenge to the lock-in-regime and inhuman and degrading conditions in Brook House. The litigation resulted in a High Court judgment that the Home Office had failed to consider how the conditions might particularly affect Muslim detainees, and had indirectly discriminated against them. The High Court also ruled that the Home Office had unlawfully permitted smoking in the centres for nine years, in breach of smoking regulations and despite the risk to the health of detainees who are locked in cramped and poorly-ventilated rooms.

The talks were followed by insightful questions from the students, discussing immigration detention in general, structural racism, accountability and how to get involved in challenging detention.

The event was co-hosted by Amnesty International, Oxford for Dunkirk, STAR (Student Action for Refugees) and the Oxford Student Union.

Patrick Page is a senior caseworker in the Immigration and Public Law department at Duncan Lewis, committed to challenging and exposing the unlawful and inhumane treatment of asylum-seekers at the hands of the Home Office. He has written extensively on a range of matters concerning human rights, asylum and immigration law for The Guardian, The Independent, The Huffington Post, The Canary and on the Liberty and Duncan Lewis websites. Patrick is also editor for the newly established ‘No Walls’, an open forum dedicated to discussions on human rights and refugee issues, hosted and run by the Duncan Lewis Public Law Department.

Nicholas Hughes is a caseworker in the Public Law and Immigration Department at Duncan Lewis, with experience in a wide variety of Judicial Review and asylum matters including, removals to European countries under the Dublin III Regulation; challenges to decisions of the Secretary of State for the Home Department to unlawfully detain and remove clients; cases involving victims of political persecution and torture; challenging the unlawful detention of LGBTI persons; statelessness; victims of trafficking; and deportation matters.

Contact Patrick and Nicholas on:

patrickp@duncanlewis.com or 020 3114 1337
nicholash@duncanlewis.com or 020 3114 1116