Turning asylum seekers into ‘dangerous criminals’:experiences of the criminal justice system of those seeking sanctuary

Since the events of 9/11 in the US in 2001 and, four years later, the 7/7 London bombings in the UK, warnings of terrorist attacks are high on the public agenda in many western countries. Politicians and tabloid press in the UK have continued to make direct and indirect connections between asylum seekers, terrorism and crime. This has increasingly resulted in harsh policy responses to restrict the movement of ‘third-world’ nationals, criminalisation of immigration and asylum policy, and making the violation of immigration laws punishable through criminal courts. This paper largely highlights the narratives of five asylum seekers who committed ‘crime’ by breaching immigration laws and were consequently treated as ‘dangerous criminals’ by the state authorities. More importantly it shows how these individuals experienced this treatment. The aim of this paper is to give voice to the victims of state abuse, claim space for victim agency, gather victim testimonies, challenge official explanations and in the process confront criminal and racist state practices

Crimmigration, imprisonment and racist violence: narratives of people seeking asylum in Great Britain

The past five decades have witnessed a dramatic growth in immigration controls. The external controls have expanded, but at the same time, there has been a proliferation of internal control measures. The British state has increasingly resorted to using penal machinery to punish people who violate immigration laws. Individuals can now be prosecuted under the criminal law and receive custodial sentences for immigration crimes. This article draws upon narratives, interviews and experiences of asylum seekers who were imprisoned for such crimes, in order to understand how their trauma is exacerbated and ways in which injuries are strategically and deliberately inflicted by the state and built within legal and policy frameworks. It draws attention to the racist nature of the crimmigration system and production of violence

Racial surveillance and the mental health impacts of electronic monitoring on migrants

Since the late 1990s, the government has used outsourced electronic monitoring (also known as tagging) in England and Wales for criminal sentencing and punishment. Under the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants) Act 2004, s36, the use of this technology extended to immigration controls, and individuals deemed as ‘high risk’ of harm, reoffending or absconding can be fitted with an ankle device and subjected to curfew. The tagging of migrants is not authorised by the criminal court and therefore not considered a punitive sanction. It is managed by the immigration system and treated as an administrative matter. Nevertheless, people who are tagged experience it as imprisonment and punishment. Drawing on data from an eighteen-month ethnographic research project, this article examines the impact of electronic monitoring on people seeking asylum, who completed their sentences for immigration offences. It uncovers the psychological effects and mental health impacts of such technologies of control. The article sheds light on how tagging is experienced by racialised minorities, and adds to the literature on migration, surveillance studies, state racism and violence. Keywords: crimmigration, electronic monitoring, e-carceration, surveillance, state racism, Home Office, migration, mental healt

Representations of Bangladeshis and internal ‘Others’ in the Indian press: the cases of Felani Khatun, Zohra Bibi and the ‘woman in red sari’

The India-Bangladesh border is the fifth longest border in the world. It is 4,096.7 km long and runs through five densely populated states in India. It is also the longest border India has with any of its neighbours. The nature of the border has created its own specific issues for bordering practices, as people cross borders informally and for variety of reasons (such as trade, farming, kinship, tourism to list a few). The response to unauthorised mobilities is always in terms of the need for more guards and physical presence, along with inhumane border control tactics and the use of force. Importantly, India’s borders and approach to the idea of security is mired in the colonial past, but also the communal and gendered ways in which the boundaries of the nation-state are represented in postcolonial India. These intersections of communal and gendered patterns are also evident in the media reporting of Muslim people and Bangladeshi migrants in India; nevertheless, it has not received sufficient academic attention. There is a dearth of literature which focuses on the representations of Bangladeshi migrants and Muslims in Indian media. This article explores how the media brings the Bangladeshi woman and the Muslim Indian woman together in a discourse which represents them as ‘other’, along the lines of gender, religion, nationality and migration status. The article utilises the existing body of work around borders, migration, media, and gender, which is developed further through the analysis of three well-publicised cases of the ‘woman in red sari’, Zohra Bibi and Felani Khatun. Their media representations bring to the fore three important themes for consideration: ‘madness’, criminality and cruelty

Time, torture and Manus island: an interview with Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofigian

Former asylum seeker detainee and journalist Behrouz Boochani (author of No Friend but the Mountains) and his collaborator Omid Tofighian speak about the experience of indefinite incarceration on Australia’s Manus Island and the psychological toll of waiting. They compare this form of detention to prison and the existential impact to torture. This Kyriarchal System, they argue, strips the individual of identity and humanity and they explain how such a system can perhaps be better questioned through the poetic fiction that Boochani has used in his path-breaking narrative than to appeal to dry rational facts and figures

Introduction

This introduction to the special issue of Race & Class Vol 62 No 3 on Race, Mental Health and State Violence by its guest-editors sets out the main themes and scope of the issue, and its genesis, together with a brief account of the contributions included

Evaluation of conservative management in uncomplicated acute appendicitis

Background: Appendectomy has been the treatment for acute appendicitis for years based on the understanding that acute appendicitis always leads to perforation and peritonitis. However, there is growing evidence that a significant proportion of patients can be successfully managed with conservative treatment without developing gangrene or perforation. Conservative treatment avoids discomfort, surgery-related morbidities and minimizes treatment cost.Methods: 60 patients taken up for conservative management were evaluated and followed up for 6 months. Study patients received intravenous antibiotics for 2 days. Repeated clinical and TLC monitoring were done. In patients whose clinical condition did not improve, appendectomy was performed. Follow-up at 10 days, 30 days, 3 months and 6 months were carried out to assess recurrence in conservatively managed patients.Results: In this study, the mean age was 25.65 years with a standard deviation of ±8.96 years. The incidence of uncomplicated appendicitis was 63.3% in males and 36.7% in females. Mean Alvarado score was 7.75 with a standard deviation of ±1.20. Failure of conservative management (conversion to appendectomy) was observed in 11.7% of patients and 4 patients (6.6%) had recurrence within 6 months. The overall treatment efficacy was 81.7%.Conclusions: In many cases, first attack of uncomplicated acute appendicitis can be treated successfully by conservative management. Treatment failure on primary admission as well as short-term recurrence up to six months after conservative treatment is low and acceptable. Incidence of complications like perforation and abscess formation are also statistically low

Torture and the UK’s “war on asylum”: medical power and the culture of disbelief

When the now ‘iconic’ images of shackled, humiliated and dehumanised detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq were broadcast globally, in the mid-2000s, the relationship between medical power and torture in the “war on terror” was also thrust sharply into focus. Graphic images of coalition troops photographing and posing in front of hooded, naked prisoners forced into a “human pyramid”, and of people made to wear animal collars, indicated a regime in which degradation had a defining role. The photograph of a soldier gloating over the corpse of a man who had died as a result of torture was just one picture of a network of interrogation camps in which detention by coalition forces could be fatal. Yet if there were any expectations that the presence of medical personnel may have checked this violence, these were shattered by the fact that clinicians – in some cases at least – were integral to its practice. «It is now beyond doubt that Armed Forces physicians, psychologists, and medics were active and passive partners in the systematic neglect and abuse of war on terror prisoners», wrote Steven Miles in 2009 (Miles 2009, X). And as he continued, this involved providing interrogators «with medical information to use in setting the nature and degree of physical and psychological abuse during interrogations». It involved monitoring «interrogations to devise ways to break prisoners down or to keep them alive». It involved pathologists holding back death certificates and autopsy reports in order to minimise the number of fatalities or cover up torture-related deaths as deaths by natural causes (Ibid). Procedures including «cramped confinement, dietary manipulation, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding» were among the practices that were «at times (…) legally sanctioned due to medical supervision» in the context of the “war on terror”, according to Hoffman (2011, 1535). He continued to suggest that doctors are not just important to «modern torture methods», they are «irreplaceable». In this context, the “war on terror” is no aberration. As the revolutionary psychoanalyst and philosopher Frantz Fanon documented in 1959, for example, certain medical practitioners had an integral role in the military occupation of Algeria, and «There are, for instance, psychiatrists … known to numerous prisoners», he suggested, «who have given electric shock treatments to the accused and have questioned them during the waking phase, which is characterized by a certain confusion, a relaxation of resistance, a disappearance of the person's defences.» (Fanon 1959/1965, 138). Indeed, in his analysis of the Algerian revolution, he discussed how resistance to and struggles over the meanings of medical power were integral to the revolution itself. However, while the role of medical power in the practice of torture has been subjected to sustained critique in the context of the “war on terror”, what follows examines the relationship between medical power and torture in the context of what has been depicted – metaphorically – as another (although to some extents related) “war”: the “war” on asylum. According to the UNHCR (2017, 3), between 5 and 35 per cent of those asylum seekers who have been granted refugee status have survived torture. And focusing on the UK as a case study, this chapter examines the institutional and legal structures prohibiting torture and inhuman and degrading treatment, particularly as they apply to those subject to immigration control in this context. But further, it also examines the ideological and political conditions within which claims by those seeking asylum that they have been subjected to torture prior to arrival can be (and have been) ignored, downplayed and denied. It examines how medical expertise has frequently been undermined in the asylum process when this expertise is utilised to add weight to asylum seekers’ claims to have experienced torture. It examines how there have been attempts to narrow the definition of torture in ways which exclude people from the protections to which torture survivors are entitled. But it also explores the ways in which segments of the medical profession have been complicit in riding roughshod over existing safeguards to prevent further harm to those who have experienced torture, thus potentially compounding its effects. In particular, it examines claims that in certain contexts clinicians have administered dangerous “care” in order to ensure the removal of people from the UK, despite them claiming that they – or their family members – face serious harm and persecution on arrival as a result of this. In a historical discussion of medical involvement in torture, Giovanni Maio (2001, 1609) has noted that from its earliest incarnations one of the features of torture has been its use as an «oppressive instrument used in the preservation of power». Furthermore, whilst methods of torture have certainly «developed», and continue to do so, he argues, this «function» of torture is «especially relevant today». This chapter argues that the (mis)treatment of those in the UK who say they have been tortured, preserves and is bound up with a particular manifestation of state power: the aims, rationale and dictates of immigration control. Its claims are perhaps much more mundane than the forms of direct medical complicity in torture alluded to above. But they are nonetheless important. For it is argued that the acts of omission and commission documented in this chapter expose the tensions between the rights of certain “categories” of migrants to be afforded adequate clinical care on the one hand, and the goals and aims of immigration control itself on the other. This poses profound questions about the functions of clinical care and the ethical duties, responsibilities and obligations of clinicians, it is suggested. But as this chapter also crucially explores, this is a form of power that many within the medical profession have historically challenged, and continue to do so