More Abuse at Yarl’s Wood?
“We have been on hunger strike since Friday protesting about the length of time we have spent in detention here,” said Aisha, who has been in Yarl’s Wood for three months. “We have been locked in the hallway all day – five ladies have fainted because they have not eaten since Friday. No one has come to give them any medical attention.
“I had an asthma attack, but no one would come to give me my inhaler. I’m very weak. But we will stay on hunger strike for as long as it takes.”
Campaigners condemned the response of the authorities at the centre, accusing them of using a “kettling” technique to trap the women.
“The women are currently trapped in an airless hallway,” said Cristel Amiss, of Black Women’s Rape Action Project. “Women should be allowed back into their rooms immediately; there should be an immediate investigation.”
The Home Office confirmed the disturbance, saying that 40 women were involved, and insisted the measures were temporary until the women could be reintegrated into the centre.
“The wellbeing of detainees is of paramount concern, which is why healthcare staff are at the scene to monitor developments,” said David Wood, strategic director at the UK Border Agency. “The detainees will be integrated back into the centre at the earliest opportunity.”
(source)
The women’s demands are listed on this Facebook page. There will be a demonstration against Serco, who manage the immigration detention centre, on 12th February.
Home Office to Make £277m From ISA
Home Office minister Meg Hillier has revealed how much revenue will be raised by applications to the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA):
Home Office minister Meg Hillier said that the £277m of revenue expected in the scheme’s first three years is intended to cover the estimated costs of both the Vetting and Barring Scheme and the Criminal Records Bureau. She was responding to written parliamentary questions from James Brokenshire, her Conservative shadow counterpart.
The cost for each application will reflect the anticipated average cost of £64 for each application, she said. Some £28 of this will be the cost of the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), which is responsible for running the scheme, and £36 for the services of the Criminal Records Bureau.
The fee is charged to people who apply for clearance to be allowed to work with organisations for children and vulnerable adults. Since 12 October last year people have been checked on a voluntary basis, but from June this year it will be compulsory.
Brokenshire also asked for an estimate of the number of people who are likely to be referred to the ISA because of fears that they pose a risk. The minister said that in the first year of operation this is estimated at 28,000.
So the biggest and most unnecessary bureaucracy in modern times has found a way to manage to pay for itself. What a shock. It’s fascinating that the only questions which are being asked of it in parliament are technical and budgetary. What about the immoral nature of the ISA? What about its surefire inability to detect genuine abuse of children and ‘vulnerable’ groups? What about the freedom the ISA has to bar people from specified work based on supposition and guesswork? What about the outrageous presumption the organisation makes, that everyone is a paedophile unless they can prove otherwise? What about the fact that no need has been demonstrated for this organisation even to exist? Alarm bells should be ringint that even now those aren’t the questions being asked by parliament.
The ISA must be abolished.
No Money Left? Keep Locking Them Up Anyway!
We have a budget deficit of about £178 billion, but New Labour can still find the money to keep locking people up:
The £4.24bn bill for the government’s prison building programme is unsustainable and the cash would be better spent on rehabilitation and prevention so as to cut crime, says a Commons select committee report on justice published tomorrow.
The MPs say the prison building scheme is at present a “costly mistake” that will take jail capacity in England and Wales to 96,000 by 2014, making it the prison capital of western Europe.
The report, Cutting Crime: the Case for Justice Reinvestment, is based on a two-year inquiry by a cross-party group of MPs. It discloses that the £4.24bn cost of creating 10,000 extra prisoner places by 2014, from 86,000, has “more or less been guaranteed by the Treasury” regardless of the coming squeeze on public spending.
The MPs claim the government “is wedded to a prison-building agenda” despite overwhelming evidence showing jail is not the most effective way of reducing reoffending for many people. At the same time the justice ministry is being asked to make £1.3bn of cost savings.
“This forecast represents an incarceration rate of 169 per 100,000 in England and Wales, the highest proportion in western Europe,” says the report. It estimates that the annual cost of keeping someone in jail has reached £40,000 a year per prisoner.
So the government’s authoritarian agenda doesn’t look set to disappear any time soon. Ironic really that they were elected in the first place, considering a ‘lock em up’ policy was one of the many hated by the electorate of the previous Tory administration, and Simon Jenkins shows the scale of the explosion in criminalisation under New Labour:
Labour has created more than 3,000 new offences since 1997, of which 1,472 at the last count were imprisonable. You can go to jail in Britain for not having a licence for a church concert, smoking in a public place, selling a grey squirrel, trans-shipping unlicensed fish, or disobeying a health and safety inspector. In many cases a prison sentence is casually tacked on the end of a statute, like some macho cherry on a cake. Parliamentarians, judges, lawyers, prison officers all complain of overwork – but complain all the way to the bank.
When the justice select committee acknowledges that jail doesn’t work in reducing reoffending, it begs the question why the Home Office should remain so resolute about chucking so many people in jail, particularly when they can’t afford it. New Labour really no longer gives a toss about being tough on the causes of crime. The reason why is clear: cowardice. The Daily HateMail’s response to the report:
The prison population should be slashed by a third – putting 28,000 offenders back on the streets, according to a group of MPs.
The justice select committee says Britain will have 96,000 prisoners by 2014 – the highest incarceration rate in western Europe – but spending £4.2billion on building the extra 12,000 prison places needed is a ‘mistake’.
The committee wants the prison population to be stabilised at its current level of 84,000 – then slashed by a third.
It would leave 56,000 inmates in jail and put 28,000 criminals on the streets.
They’re terrified of being seen as soft on crime, or at least as being portrayed by the nastiest tabloid as being soft on crime, and 12 years later are as paranoid as ever. I mean why not just explain why it’s not a good idea, stand by the argument and prove it by example? The Right manage to do that with their ideology (even though they never succeed in proving it by example), so why can’t the Left, when they actually could demonstrate the truth of their argument? Why continue to try to outflank the Right by being rightist?
Attacking Uganda’s Government’s Homophobia Isn’t Racist
It would be unthinkable to see laws passed in Washington or EU advocating the death penalty for homosexuality, but Uganda is rushing headlong into a homophobic abyss:
The proposed law is more a rant against homosexuality and the west than a workable piece of legislation intended for Uganda itself. Much of it consists of a list of unfounded claims, starting with the statement that “same sex attraction is not an innate and immutable characteristic”. Infamously, it calls for the execution of gay men found guilty of “aggravated homosexuality” – by which it means those who are HIV positive, or who have sex with someone who is under 18 or disabled. The bill may be amended during its passage through parliament to replace the death penalty with life imprisonment, but that change would be only a gesture to spare the blushes of Uganda’s aid donors. If passed – which looks likely, since its sponsor is a member of Uganda’s ruling party – the bill will continue to write hate into law.
To say that acceptance of homosexuality is a ‘liberal’ or ‘Western’ perspective is essentially to collude in the abuse of gay people around the world. Of course being gay is an innate and immutable characteristic, and to propose the death penalty for HIV positive men and jail for everyone else isn’t just immoral it’s backward. Some will say such a statement is racist, but when was it true that all Ugandans, Africans or black people were homophobic? On the contrary, considering the wide-ranging dangers the bill poses, should we not be allying ourselves with Ugandans opposed to this hate law?
David Bahati, Ndorwa County West minister of parliament, tabled the Bill saying Uganda needed comprehensive legislation to prohibit any form of sexual relations between people of the same sex.
The Bill, according to Bahati, seeks to plug gaps in the Ugandan constitution, and stipulate that marriage is between a man and a woman only. Other unions will not be recognised. And if same sex couples are married abroad, they face life imprisonment.
Practising homosexuality has been illegal in Uganda and is listed in the penal code, though police say it is hard to investigate this crime because “homosexuals operate under cover”.
But the new Bill now forces people in authority to report offences to the police within 24 hours, or they themselves will face fines or up to three years in prison.
Anyone found guilty of committing homosexuality, or advocating homosexuality to a group or assembly, will face a prison sentence. The penalties are up to 10 years in prison or a fine not exceeding $5,500 or both.
The Bill also seeks extra territorial jurisdiction and will apply to any Ugandan involved in a LGBT relationship outside of the country. The Bill also seeks to extradite any Ugandan guilty of the offences it lists.
Under the terms of Britain’s Extradition Act Uganda is covered as a category 2 territory, which, whilst not allowing the extradition of an HIV positive Ugandan, would certainly allow for the extradition of any other Ugandan covered by the country’s gay hate legislation. Should it pass, the Home Office must make it clear that the Act will not be used to allow the infringement of human rights by the Ugandan government, and separately that gay asylum seekers will under no circumstances be returned to Uganda.
This is a law attacking basic human rights and should it pass it must have consequences. The Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law (CHRCL) acknowledges the scope of this attack:
“In reality this would involve Uganda withdrawing from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its protocols, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights.”
The Swedes, who currently hold the rotating EU presidency, and who donate $50 annually to Uganda, have said they’ll rescind their annual contribution should the law pass. Britain should not just call for the country to be immediately suspended from the Commonwealth, but she should follow Sweden’s lead.
Police Abuse of Photographers is Stupid!
Do you think it’s an act of insanity for a police officer to stop and search someone taking a photograph of a sunset? Tell that story to any reasonable person and they’ll say you made it up, but the truth is stranger than fiction. Matthew Parris recounts the story:
He [BBC photographer Jeff Overs] was there [Andrew Marr Show] to describe an attempt by the Metropolitan Police to stop him photographing a sunset over St Paul’s Cathedral. The officer had been acting, she said, under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act. She’d been stopping loads of people taking pictures that afternoon “and nobody’s complained”. I mentioned that I’d been moved on from among the pigeons in Trafalgar Square when recording (into something no bigger than a Dictaphone) for a radio programme about wild animals in London. Mariella said she thought it was sinister.
I think it’s worse than sinister. It’s plumb stupid. Is there anything you could call a presiding human intelligence at work in our counter-terrorism operations? Has nobody in the Met heard of Google Street View? Do senior officers talk to junior officers about priorities, and if so, do they think it likely that al-Qaeda would use operatives carrying professional photographic equipment, rather than disguised as tourists with mobile phones? Do they think that if an officer has reason to suspect someone of taking pictures for the purposes of terrorism, the appropriate response could ever be just to tell them to stop?
For those of you eager to find out what the plods are and aren’t allowed to do as regards photographers and Section 44 have a read of this:
* If police stop and search you, the first thing you should ask is on what grounds they are conducting the search and under what powers.
* Police are able to conduct searches under a number of different pieces of legislation but they usually use either the Public Order Act, the Criminal Justice Act or under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
* Unless you are stopped while driving a car, you do NOT have to give your name or address.
* Police officers are obliged to ask for your given ethnicity. Once again, it is up to you whether you choose to answer or not.
* If police use Section 44 of the Terrorism Act they are entitled to view any images you have taken but they are NOT allowed to delete them. They can only do so with a court order.
* Under Section 58a of the Terrorism Act, police are only allowed to stop a photographer taking pictures of officers if they reasonably suspect the photos are intended to be used in connection with terrorism.
* Whether you are stopped and searched, or merely stopped and accounted for, the police officer should hand you a record of your stop.
Yet of course abuses under Section 44 continue. Take photographer Jerome Taylor:
I was on the South Bank of the Thames trying to compose a shot of the Houses of Parliament last week when two police officers stopped me.
Despite living in London for the past five years I had never photographed the Houses of Parliament before. I wish I’d never bothered. Just as I’d finished fine-tuning my first composition, two officers appeared. “Excuse me, sir,” said one. “My colleague and I would like to perform a stop-and-account on you. Don’t worry, you haven’t done anything wrong.”
For the next 10 minutes I was questioned about my evening and asked to give my height, name, address and ethnicity – all of which was recorded in a form that will now be held at the nearest police station for the next year. The form explained why I had been stopped: “Using a camera and tripod next to Westminster Bridge,” it read.
When asked about Taylor on the BBC, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), Britain’s for-profit advisory quango for the police said:
On BBC One, [Chief Constable Andy] Trotter reaffirmed that the two police officers should not have used Section 44 powers to stop Taylor. ‘It’s hard to understand why Jerome was stopped,’ he said. ‘There was no need to do a stop-and-search in that case.’
He added that it was not ‘an offence to take a photograph in a public place. ‘These powers were brought in to protect the public, not to oppress,’ Trotter told BBC One.
Trotter’s comments only reaffirmed guidelines issued by the Home Office that specifically say that photography is legal in the UK and that powers given by the Terrorism Act 2000 shouldn’t be used to prevent photographers from taking images in public.
ACPO says Section 44 was brought in to protect, not to oppress, however yet again when push comes to shove, the police (and Met in particular) do everything in their power to oppress. Matthew Parris is right later in his article when he says all the surveilling a terrorist need do can be done in complete privacy on Google Earth – it’s not just absurd to suspect numerous, clearly law-abiding photographers of terrorism, it’s just plain stupid. But hey that’s the standard of policing we have in this country. They have guidelines from the Home Office and ACPO not to behave like this, yet they persist with next to no accountability.
Manchester ID Cards Pilot Fails
The government is pressing ahead with the piloting of the ID cards scheme in Manchester, despite Manchester’s complete and utter indifference:
96% of respondents in a recent Manchester Evening News online poll opposed the scheme. Fewer than 2,000 people in the north-west have “expressed interest” in the ID cards, and that number includes opponents like myself.
Despite lack of interest, the government is still pushing ahead with the scheme, spending £230,000 every day to bring it about. Its current claims are that it is a cheap, convenient way to prove your identity.
An ID card costs £30 initially, compared with £77.50 for your first adult passport – but for now you need a passport to apply for an ID card. Regardless, the ID card scheme costs every taxpayer about £300. It would save money if the government instead gave everyone a free adult passport when they turn 16. The passport cost has also increased from £42 in 2005, only £8 of which can be justified for meeting international standards for the insecure “e-Passports”.
I don’t need to carry about vast quantities of paperwork with me on a daily basis to prove my identity or address. I rarely need anything more than my bank card to talk to my bank. A card that lives in my wallet is something I’m more likely to lose – and risk the fine for not reporting a lost ID card..
Clearly, I don’t want an ID card and shouldn’t register. But why am I protesting against it? It’s a voluntary scheme, and people can take it or leave it, right?
Well yes. It depends though on whether or not you want ever to leave the country on holiday or on business again. It’ll depend on whether or not you want to end up at university. And with function creep already driving the Independent Safeguarding Authority’s Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS), that’ll only be the tip of the iceberg. Voluntary yes, but compulsory by stealth. It strikes me that Manchester though has already moved beyond those arguments – the city both doesn’t know the pilot is taking place and doesn’t see the need for it. And why should they? As Home Office minister Meg Hillier said to them:
“But another real benefit is that once you have registered no-one can steal your identity” and “the databases will be very secure – think Police National Computer. No-one will be able to download information and it will not be on PCs on people’s desks.”
Except haven’t I read they’ve already been cloned? And since when are government databases secure? People’s information won’t be safe on ID cards, and given that abundantly clearly innocent people are being accused of terrorism merely for taking pictures of sunsets or high streets, how can anyone have any faith in why the government needs this scheme to succeed? Of course the reason why they need it to succeed is quite sinister: they want to recast the entire nature of identity for the 21st century. ID cards are a vital component for how these people see people’s relationship with government in the future, and they will use any argument, threaten every punishment, conceal every truth in order to make it happen. It must be resisted at all costs, not just ignored. Hillier went on to say:
“The penalty charges are really an encouragement to keep info up to date – this only actually affects your address. The main beneficiary of up to date address is the card holder so we don’t envisage many people not complying.”
See? ‘We’ll punish you for your own good.’ It’s authoritarian and quite quite despicable.
Minority Report On The Way!
Over the span of this Labour government we’ve seen the degradation of the rule of law and attacks on evidence-based policy making, but now we have full-blown pre-criminalisation:
He said the [human genetics] commission had received evidence from a former police superintendent that it was now the norm to arrest offenders for everything possible. “It is apparently understood by serving police officers that one of the reasons, if not the reason, for the change in practice is so that the DNA of the offender can be obtained,” said Montgomery, adding that it would be a matter of very great concern if this was now a widespread practice.
The report says there is very little concrete evidence on the importance of the DNA match in leading to a conviction and whether the suspect would have been identified by other means anyway.
It argues the database creates “pre-suspects” who are the first to be checked whenever a new crime is entered. This leads to a “no smoke without fire” culture that may be pervasive and hard to overcome.
Whatever happened the presumption of innocence? How can this database have been allowed to ‘function creep’ this severely, when its to crime detection is falling, despite an exponential increase in the number of profiles retained on it? And given the way in which the database is being used, how can any of the near-million innocent people on it be confident that their genetic information won’t be misused? Over three-quarters of black men between 18 and 35 having profiles still on the database suggests something has already gone horribly wrong. There is an attitude in the criminal justice system that anything goes in avoiding risk and preventing the public from danger, but also incredible laziness by the police, who seem to think that DNA matches are the catch-all solutions to crime detection. The figures sadly prove them completely wrong. The Home Office blusters:
“DNA samples are taken on arrest for recordable offences carrying a prison sentence. The Government is clear that this is the right threshold for taking and retaining DNA. We know that the DNA database is a vital crime-fighting tool, identifying 410,589 crime scenes between 1998 and March 2009 with a DNA match and a possible lead on the possible identity of the offender.”
Yet look at the figures:
Figures show that for the past six years the number of crimes solved using DNA evidence has remained static at between 0.34 and 0.36 per cent – about one in 300 of all recorded crimes.
The number of crimes which were solved by a DNA match fell by 13 per cent to 17,614 last year as recorded crime fell overall, according to figures contained in Parliamentary answers.
Over the same period the number of people’s whose identity was on the national DNA database more than doubled in size from 1.9million people to 4.1million.
Trust the Home Office on this? I think not. Independent oversight over the National DNA Database must happen immediately. As Liberty quite rightly points out, leaving it as a tool for the police to do with as they wish is leading to abuses of people who still have the right to be presumed innocent.
ISA’s Futile Barring Scheme Begins
Publicservice.co.uk reports that today marked Day 1 of the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA)’s Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS):
Home Office Minister David Hanson said: “Today marks a major step forward in the protection of the most vulnerable members of our society. The new scheme means greater assurance that anyone who regularly works or volunteers with children or vulnerable adults will be appropriate to do so. We believe this is a common sense approach, and what the public would rightly expect.”
The deputy children’s commissioner, Sue Berelowitz, played down criticism of the scheme and said it was not “over-bureaucratic” and did not limit opportunities for volunteers to work with children.
Whilst the scheme has now come into force, the vetting does not become mandatory until next year. People looking to work or volunteer with vulnerable groups must become registered with ISA by November 2010. Existing workers must start to become registered by April 2011.
Sue Berelowitz is clearly living on another planet. The VBS isn’t over-bureaucratic? Really? So determining risk for children or other ‘vulnerable adults’ through a graph matrix applied to each individual vetted by the scheme isn’t bureaucratic. So not allowing employers to use their own discretion, but imposing huge fines on them and the barred employee, should either or both parties choose to ignore or disagree with the ISA, isn’t bureaucratic. So the fact that the ISA is entitled to use evidence which would never be allowed in a court of law to make barring decisions isn’t bureaucratic? And what about the scheme itself? Well it covers:
- regulated activity, which it defines as paid or voluntary work which involves contact with children or vulnerable adults;
- controlled activity, which it defines as support work that is ‘frequent or intensive’ in the NHS, the health sector in general, further education, adult social care, and work in specified organisations with frequent access to sensitive records about children and vulnerable adults.
Oh and a barred person can work in a controlled activity as long as ‘safeguards’ are put in place. None of this is clearly overly bureaucratic.The thing is none of it is necessary at all.
Employers have risk assessment and safeguarding policies, local agencies like the police, social services and the probation services are all already required to talk to one another about people they feel pose risks to vulnerable groups (and to act accordingly), and we already have the CRB (which is admittedly merely a snapshot of someone’s criminal justice history). The only additional ‘safeguarding’ the ISA provides is determined by an administrator far removed from the person they’re vetting, who can use entirely unfair, meaningless and irrelevant criteria (such as heresay or even their own prejudices about their sex lives) to determine someone’s suitability for ‘regulated’ or ‘controlled’ activity. Does that make sense to you? It doesn’t to me.
And remember this is all to keep the most vulnerable members of society safe from the legions of paedophile hordes, which it presumes we all are, unless we spend £64 to prove otherwise. Noone debates there are abusers out there, nor that there are paedophiles who will stop at nothing to get to children and young people. But as Esther Rantzen recently pointed out, the vast majority of child abuse happens at the hand of ‘people very close to them’. The ISA was created in response to the murders committed by Ian Huntley in Soham in 2002, but he’d never have had a chance if his employer had carried out the pre-CRB-era checks on his background. It also wasn’t his employment at the school he worked at which led to the murders – it was a chance encounter. The ISA is a bureaucratic nightmare which has already cost nearly £200 million; it subverts the rule of law, and is entirely unnecessary.
The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished.
The ISA Will Always Fail
What Vanessa George, Colin Blanchard and Angela Allen did to those children is so heinous I can barely grasp it:
Nursery worker Vanessa George and her accomplices Colin Blanchard and Angela Allen face lengthy jail terms after admitting a string of sex offences yesterday.
The three – who had started a bizarre relationship online – met for the first time in the dock at Bristol crown court, where they pleaded guilty to abusing young children and sharing the images of that abuse with each other.
It also emerged there had been online discussion between the three about abducting a child. Officers believe this may have been nothing more than a fantasy but expressed relief that finding and catching them had halted any nascent plots.
A serious case review has been launched to look at how George, previously considered a stalwart of her community in Devon, was able to abuse children. There have been calls for the use of camera phones in nurseries to be looked at again and for more checks to make sure workers do not get such easy and private one-to-one access with children.
(via ScoobsChris)
This isn’t a post about how unusual child abuse conducted by women is. I want it to be abundantly clear that Vanessa George passed her Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check and she almost certainly would have passed the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA)’s Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS). This whole case makes a mockery of the Home Office’s strategy of child protection – expecting a database or a bureaucracy to detect an abuser who doesn’t have a criminal record, and who has probably become skilful at concealing their behaviour is lunacy. Instead these three were able to commit their horrific crimes against children because:
“The nursery was not run properly. The problem was there were about 10 staff and they are all good friends – so standards got really slack.”
Parents knew standards were slack, the nursery was run poorly and then there’s Ofsted, which said after George’s arrest:
“Ofsted was unaware of the recent allegations about a member of staff at Little Ted’s Nursery in Plymouth which we understand has led to its immediate closure.
“We have had one recent complaint relating to the nursery. This complaint was not of a level that would require police involvement and did not relate to the content of the allegations made public today.
“Ofsted is investigating this matter in line with our normal procedures and it would not be appropriate to comment further until the outcomes of that investigation are complete.”
Could children’s services or the Local Safeguarding Children’s Board have stopped this? Maybe not, but it’s an indication of just how many services are out there tasked with safeguarding children, who actually have involvement with children, and even they weren’t able to detect this abuse until it was too late. Expect the ISA, with its starting presumption that everyone‘s a paedophile, to do any better will end in disaster for the genuinely vulnerable.
Why Attack the Calais Refugees?
When we dehumanise other human beings we lose part of what makes us human. If I had the time and resources I would have gladly attended the protests at the ‘Jungle’ outside Calais, the camp from which the mainly Afghan refugees were forcibly removed this week. Sadly though I had to watch from afar again, as people in search of a better life were deemed unacceptable, and unworthy of the human rights to which they are entitled. Jason Parkinson’s piece below shows you the brutal reality of what happened:
When French immigration minister Eric Besson calls the Calais “jungle” camp clearance a “dignified” success, Alan Johnson expresses his “delight” and immigration minister Phil Woolas questions whether these refugees deserve sanctuary, they expose the asylum system as profoundly broken.
What I saw at 8am on Tuesday was not dignified or humane. Men were wrestled and thrown to the ground, others head-locked and throttled. One boy collapsed and was removed. Not by the police, but by protesters.
As Parkinson points out, EU law says that asylum seekers must claim asylum in the first country they land in. But it’s an horrific cop out to suggest to people genuinely fleeing persecution in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq or Eritrea (few of whom will do so by air) can only claim asylum in member states which are essentially the closest to them. Italy? With its current persecution of Roma? Greece? With its treatment of refugees? That system has resulted in:
illegal push-backs of migrants at the Turkish border, the puncturing of boats in the Aegean Sea, deplorable conditions of detention, police brutality, and various legal and administrative tricks to keep asylum seekers from lodging a claim, all of which Human Rights Watch exhaustively documented in two reports published late last year.
The Dublin Convention is clearly a failure, yet Britain and France express delight at the prospect of sending refugees back to the first EU country they entered, which in many cases for refugees formerly living in the Calais ‘jungle’ was Greece. This is particularly alarming considering many fellow EU governments have stopped transferring asylum seekers back there. Yet immigration minister Phil Woolas:
rejected suggestions that (even) those (merely) with family links should be allowed to come to Britain to claim asylum: “If they were asylum seekers they would have claimed asylum in France or in the first country they came to,” he said. The home secretary said “genuine refugees” would be offered protection if they claimed asylum in the first safe country they reached. The rest were expected to go home.
Such compassion. No doubt there will be economic migrants in their number, no doubt hardened criminals too. But to dismiss the genuine needs and concerns of refugees, and falling back on an asylum system which benefits neither refugee nor host country is just monstrous. Green Party leader Caroline Lucas MEP has spoken out, saying:
“Rather than fulfilling their responsibilities to seekers of asylum under both EU and international law, the French and British governments are turning a blind eye to the suffering taking place on their own doorsteps. Home Secretary Alan Johnson‘s glee in the wake of this aggressive police raid is particularly disturbing.
“The plan for mass deportations of these refugees rides roughshod over the European Convention on Human Rights, the 1951 Refugee Convention and the Geneva Convention. And given that so many facing expulsion are children, the plans may also breach the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
“This short term ‘solution’ is not only inhumane – it will not work. The French are not playing their part in allowing people to claim asylum in Calais, and must commit to making the official procedures for seeking asylum more accessible to those in need. Equally, other EU Member states must recognise their duty to share the responsibility.”
Protests against the UK Border Agency have taken place here, here here and here. There is continuing coverage by Calais Migrant Solidarity here.
Patronising Us Into ID Cards?
The government, dissatisfied with public indifference to ID cards has decided to patronising us into allowing our identities to be privatised:
The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) will unveil animated fingerprint characters this week to promote the scheme to businesses, ahead of a consumer campaign in early 2010. The first wave of activity aims to build recognition among those businesses that will be regularly presented with cards by consumers. These include those in the retail, finance and education sectors.
‘The government is wasting vast sums of taxpayers’ money on the scheme,’ said shadow home secretary Chris Grayling. ‘Instead of marketing the scheme, it should be scrapping it.’ The Conservative Party has pledged to axe the cards if it wins the next general election.
It’s really shocking that a government which a) doesn’t have money to spend on needless projects and b) needs a big idea which works to catapult it into the next general election to give it a snowball’s chance in hell of winning should be continuing with its ID cards adventure. But it’s also not surprising. Home Secretary Alan Johnson’s committed the Home Office to a wholesale redefinition of identity for the 21st century (one defined by government, surprisingly enough), so despite his attempts to have us believe ID cards are dead, we still have a fight on our hands.
(via No2ID and Liberty Central)
Independent Safeguarding Authority Head Patronises His Opponents
Sir Roger Singleton, the government-appointed head of the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) has decided that rather than giving a reason why the ISA should exist, he’d rather just patronise the scheme’s opponents:
Sir Roger, whose agency will run the vetting scheme, said: “We need to calm down and consider carefully and rationally what this scheme is and is not about.
“It is not about interfering with the sensible arrangements which parents make with each other to take their children to schools and clubs.
“It is not about subjecting a quarter of the population to intensive scrutiny of their personal lives and it is not about creating mistrust between adults and children or discouraging volunteering.”
He added: “It is about ensuring that those people who have already been dismissed by their employers for inappropriate behaviour with children do not simply up sticks and move elsewhere in the country to continue their abuse.
“And it is about bringing an end to the need for repeated CRB checks which so many people have found irritating. ISA registration is a one-off process for a single fee.”
Except he’s wrong on all counts, and for the record Sir Roger I am calm, I have considered your scheme carefully and rationally and know exactly what it’s about. It’s about presuming that everyone in the country is a paedophile unless they can prove (at their cost) otherwise. It’s about discouraging children from risk-assessing on their own, and teaching them to believe that a giant, unmanageable bureaucracy can protect them from harm. It’s about undermining the rule of law, using heresay, supposition, guesswork and a graph matrix to quantify ‘unsuitability’ by people who are themselves unaccountable for their decisions. The ISA makes all the wrong presumptions about relationships in society, breaks down trust and quite simply isn’t necessary. Oh and it doesn’t supplant the CRB…
There are people who would have you believe that the ISA or even CRB would have prevented Ian Huntley’s Soham murders, but it’s already been determined that even the most basic (and pre-CRB) checks would have stopped him in his tracks; they were never done. As Esther Rantzen rightly said, the vast majority of abuse is committed by people whom the victim already knows – the ISA is yet another scheme aimed at giving the illusion that the government is doing something, when the people already tasked with protection aren’t (for a variety of reasons). All risk can never be eliminated and certainly won’t be by a bureaucracy.
The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished (calmly and rationally).
Child Protection Minister Justifies ISA With Propaganda
Baroness Morgan, Britain’s Child Protection Minister, when interviewed on Channel 4 News, fails to put forward a single argument about why the Independent Safeguarding Authority is necessary:
When pushed by Krishnan Guru-Murthy that the ISA isn’t needed because most abuse does not happen with total strangers, she agrees with him, before returning on-Home-Office-message with the crack that ‘you need to know’ that people in positions of trust ‘have been properly vetted’. If most abuse takes place in private, invariably by people who would not be on a ‘barring’ list old or new anyway, then I fail to understand where the need for vetting comes at all. Morgan then resorts to the familiar Home Office tactic of presenting the ISA as a solution to a serious problem (even though there isn’t one), and hammers home her rationale for the ISA (even though there isn’t one), in the hope that her relentless propaganda will gain public support for it. But the rationale for this £170 million scheme simply isn’t evidence-based: she insists that it’s a step on from the simple ‘snapshot’ of a CRB check, but conveniently again fails to admit that it really does provide no additional, meaningful information. The extra intelligence the ISA uses to bar people from working with children and/or ‘vulnerable adults’ is heresay – evidence which would not be admissible in a court of law, and is used in the most meaningless and arbitrary way in order to come up with barring decisions.
With its presumption that everyone is a paedophile unless they prove otherwise (at their cost), the ISA undermines the rule of law, will have the most pernicious effects on adult and adult-child relationships and won’t provide any meaningful protection for children or ‘vulnerable adults’. Sir Michael Bichard, the man whose report into the Soham murders led to the formation of the ISA, has expressed surprise and dismay at the scale of the ISA’s remit, but essentially writes that and the rest of its collateral damage off as ‘irrelevant’ as long as children were protected; in other words the ends justify the means – that damaging the lives of adults is worth it if it succeeds in safeguarding children or ‘vulnerable adults’ (which can’t be proven). And Morgan implicitly says exactly the same thing when in response to Guru-Murthy’s statement that most abuse happens in the home she says, ‘we must take all steps that we can’ (in protecting children). In other words, even though there’s no need for it and it will have disastrous repercussions, we’re going to do it anyway. Well when the ISA fails in its remit, and ends up causing significant social damage, I hope those words come back to bite them both.
The Independent Safeguarding Authority must be abolished.
Johnson Could Save McKinnon But Won’t
Home Secretary Alan Johnson has previously insisted that his hands were tied, that he was legally unable to intervene in the extradition of Gary McKinnon to the US. However in his meeting this week with David Davis, Michael Meacher and Chris Huhne he changed his tune:
“[Johnson] did accept that it would be possible for him to intervene and that it wasn’t unlawful for him to intervene, but claimed the limits of his discretion meant he had to be governed by law and precedents,” said [Meacher's] spokesman. “He was concerned that precedents would be set for terrorists.”
In a blog post on Wednesday, Meacher said Johnson felt his scope for intervention was narrowed by Article 3 of the Convention on Human Rights, which limits interference in extradition to cases where the subject is at real risk of execution, torture, or inhuman or degrading treatment.
The three politicians came away from the meeting feeling that Johnson had been prepared to listen to their case, and that it “wasn’t the end of the road”, Meacher’s spokesman said.
The group of MPs is now trying to meet the US Ambassador to try to get the US government to withdraw extradition proceedings on human rights grounds. The Department of Public Prosecutions believes McKinnon doesn’t have a case to answer in the UK and that the case won’t stand up in a US court; Johnson should use his powers to step in and end this circus. So he believes the precedent would aid terrorists, but I don’t accept for a moment that a UFO-obsessed computer hacker with Asperger’s Syndrome is a legitimate sacrifice to the continuing ‘war on terror’.
Sarah’s Law is Better Than Megan’s Law. So What?
Mary Dejevsky argues Britain’s version of America’s Megan’s Law is an improvement:
But this pilot Sarah’s Law was, in fact, very different from Megan’s Law, and potentially more effective for that reason. As a rule, it preserves the anonymity of registered offenders, leaving in place the incentive to remain above ground. Their disappearance is what prompts disclosure of identity. Information will be provided about convicted sex offenders in the neighbourhood, but only to those with a reason to ask. There are no police websites, where you can scan, voyeuristically, for paedophiles on your own, or someone else’s, patch.
The most innovative, and pertinent, aspect of Sarah’s Law, however, allows parents and other carers to ask the police whether someone with access to their children has a child sex conviction. This recognises that abductions, such as that of Jaycee Dugard in California or Sarah Payne here, account for a tiny minority of child sex offences.
The vast majority are committed by members of the child’s immediate circle, with fully 80 per cent taking place in the home of the offender or the victim. Mothers who might have concerns about a new partner are among those encouraged to use the service, and in the four areas of the pilot, more than 80 applications for information were received in the first six months alone.
It is true that Stacey Lawrence’s killer, although accused of assault by his former wife, would not have shown up in police records – even if Stacey’s mother had suspected anything (which she did not). Nor can it be known how often paedophiles seek out lone mothers, with a view to gaining access to their children. But what cannot be disputed is that there will be more cases like Stacey Lawrence’s than will have drama of Jaycee Dugard’s, and that Sarah’s Law is better framed to protect children than Megan’s – even if in Stacey’s case, tragically, it failed.
It’s a somewhat odd argument, which she concludes by arguing against. Firstly she’s right – there will always be a level of risk in society – for adults as well as children, but these laws are being pursued anyway; they are symptom of a prevailing belief in government that databases and registers can somehow protect us from all ills. It’s a dangerous delusion. Sometimes Sarah Paynes will happen, even if they’re as thoroughly supervised as parents could naturally be expected to manage, and Stacey Lawrences indeed can’t be 100% prevented – what about dangerous people who don’t appear on the sex offenders’ register? She fails however to acknowledge the other fundamental flaws in the ‘Sarah’s Law’ pilots – applying the same rationalised principles we do to our economy to the administration of our private relationships is just bananas – it’s not only counter-productive (adults and children becoming increasingly alienated from each other, children not taught to risk assess on their own), but it really won’t result in vulnerable adults being safeguarded any better than ‘Megan’s Law’ – is anyone really naïve enough to think the police with parents ‘and other carers’ can be trusted any more than a baying mob?
It’s a step forward to acknowledge that the vast majority of paedophile attacks happen within the close family, I’ll admit (though it fundamentally undermines the entire rationale for having an Independent Safeguarding Authority), but this project (as the ISA) undermines the basis of justice and the rule of law. It’s a dangerous road we head down if we accept the validity of permanent punishment, and doubly so when we remember that the categorisation of what’s now labelled as a ‘child sex offence’ has grown exponentially under New Labour – presuming that everyone on the sex offenders’ register presents an equal risk to children will just put hundreds of people who do not pose any threat into the line of fire. It misses the point – firstly why not look for people with sexual offences prevention orders (SOPO) rather than the less informative ‘child sex convictions’, but why stop there? If the aim is ‘protection’ why not do a full criminal records bureau (CRB)? Why not get ‘someone with access to their children’ vetted by the ISA? Where would it end? The milkman? New boyfriend? Child’s new best friend? Their parents? Their extended family? Where does the line get drawn? History has shown when such intrusion can be taken to an extreme it will be, and for how significant a benefit?
Is it right to try to protect children as much as possible? Of course, but to say Sarah’s Law is better than Megan’s because of a presumption that individuals who ‘need to know’ are less likely to threaten the safety of people on the sex offenders’ register than the general public, in a free-for-all information grab is staggeringly naïve. Sarah’s Law is just as much a hand-wringing sop to the child protection lobby as Megan’s Law, it will continue to increase alienation between adults and children, distort how private relationships are formed in this country, and lead us away from what was once a more enlightened understanding of risk assessment. We may live in a largely post-modern society but I have no desire for it to be run under The Jeremy Kyle Show’s principles. These pilots undermine the social fabric itself.
