We welcome the opportunity to feed into the consultation on the draft Removal Centre Rules (RCR). We are concerned about a number of aspects of the draft RCR. As the rules are long and complex we have provided a summary of our primary concerns here.

This death is a tragedy and is acutely felt by detainees left behind, locked in immigration removal centres.  

We have clients, including vulnerable torture and trafficking survivors, who have witnessed self-harm by fellow detainees and become immensley distressed by the experience.  After a death in detention, some of our clients call us, frightened, in severe distress and inconsolable. 

Medical Justice sends volunteer doctors to visit immigration detainees to document scars of torture and challenge instances of medical mistreatment. The continued detention of a number of our clients has been found by the High Court to have amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment. Inquests have found neglect contributing to other deaths in immigration detention.

Indefinite detention, coupled with inadequate healthcare can exacerbate detainees’ existing medical condition and be the cause of mental illness.  The Home Office is well aware of the issues – our report “Death in Immigration Detention” documents that year after year investigations into deaths in immigration detention reveal ongoing systemic healthcare failings. 

Each death occurring in immigration detention is avoidable as immigration detention is optional.  The majority of detainees are released back into the community, making this damaging practice all the more senseless. 

The ever-rising death toll and suffering is the human consequence of the UK’s dehumanising and unjust detention system. We agree with the British Medical Association’s call to phase out immigration detention otherwise the deaths and harm will continue.

Read more: The Guardian

We released our Annual Review 2018-19 in July, at our AGM.

In the week the report went to print, 7 of our clients were scheduled to be removed from the UK (one of them twice). None of them ultimately were. Two had been released by the end of the week. Most of them are likely to be granted leave to remain eventually. This is an indication of the effectiveness of our casework and fantastic volunteer doctors and interpreters, carrying out assessments and writing up reports at all hours. It also indicates how many people the Home Office attempts to remove who are medically unfit to fly or who have scars of torture which they have not had the opportunity to documented until they got within days of being removed.

Our clinicians remain troubled by the inadequate healthcare in detention and the risks to people’s lives that are taken – for example, delays in obtaining clinical results and a failure to share them with the patient, including cases of inadequate monitoring for cancer of the blood, anticoagulant medication, and diabetes. Another of many examples is a reluctance to transfer patients to hospital as an emergency when this is indicated.

A volunteer visiting an immigration removal centre for the first time said “I have been a doctor for over 10 years and am used to seeing patients who may be vulnerable or are suffering physically or mentally. But there was helplessness, despair and fear most apparent in these patients that was totally alien to me. It is hard to see how the environment would not adversely affect any person’s physical and mental health, let alone the most vulnerable.”

In his second Home Office commissioned review of the detention of vulnerable detainees, Stephen Shaw found that 44% of detainees were classed as Adults at Risk. Identifying people as being at risk without releasing them is indefensible in our view. Shaw noted : ‘Every [immigration removal] centre manager told me they had seen no difference in number of vulnerable detainees and in some cases it had increased’. Clearly the Home Office’s incongruously named “Adults at Risk” policy is failing to protect vulnerable people.

Medical Justice successfully challenged the “Adults at Risk” policy, again. Detainees previously acknowledged by the Home Office as a torture victim were later not accepted as such using the newer definition.

We intervened in the Supreme Court case of KV, a Sri Lankan who had scars ‘highly consistent’ with having been burnt with hot metal rods. Lower courts said the scars could have been ‘self-inflicted by proxy’ and that the medical expert had ‘trespassed beyond their proper remit”. The Supreme Court questioned the ‘self-infliction by proxy’ reasoning and reasserted the role of the medical expert in documenting torture scars.

We initiated a legal challenge of the “no-notice” removals policy which enabled the Home Office to refuse a migrant’s case and forcibly deport them, within hours and in many cases without access to legal representation.

Medical Justice was quoted 30 times in the media, including by the Times, the Huffington Post, the International Bar Association, the British Medical Journal, the Independent, the Guardian, BBC News and Channel 5 News.

We ended the financial year with an uplifting agreement from parliamentarians that establishing an All Party Parliamentary Group was apt, and that Medical Justice is well placed to act as the secretariat.

Read the full report.

The report shows that, although migrant pregnant women are detained with a view to their removal, only 5% of those held in one particular detention centre in the UK in 2011 were successfully removed. It also finds that the healthcare these women received in detention was inadequate and that asylum seeking women have poorer health outcomes during and after childbirth than others. The report shows the risks that detention entails for pregnancy and calls on the British government to stop detaining pregnant women.

Read the report

The Home Office was recently made to accept their responsibility in the tragic miscarriage of a rape survivor. The woman was unlawfully held in immigration detention which amounted to inhumane and degrading treatment.

This case shows precisely why the Home Office must, finally, heed of our advice and that of the medical profession, and actually ban the detention of pregnant women.

Medical Justice sent volunteer midwives to visit pregnant women in immigration detention for a decade. We warned the Home Office that women and their unborn children were suffering from inadequate healthcare and that they should ban the detention of pregnant women immediately. The Home Office paid little attention.

One of our clients had complained for three weeks about abdominal pains was sent to A & E where she miscarried with two guards in attendance. She subsequently attempted suicide and was admitted into a psychiatric ward.

In 2013 we published “Expecting Change: The case for ending the detention of pregnant women”, a dossier which called for the end of detention for pregnant women. This call was backed by the Royal College of Midwives and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, as well as 337 organisations.

In 2015 Channel 4 News undercover cameras revealed the callous treatment of pregnant women in detention. In 2016 the Home Office commission Stephen Shaw, a former Prison and Probation Ombudsman to review the use of immigration detention – he too called for a ban on the detention of pregnant women.

The detention of pregnant women was curtailed to 72 hours, extendable up to a week with ministerial authorisation, following a concerted campaign by non-governmental organisations, medical professionals and parliamentarians in 2016. But as we can see from this case, this is not enough. A time limit will only go so far, which is why we must end detention for pregnant women.

When asked by the Home Office for a follow-on review in 2018, Shaw called again for a total ban on the detention of pregnant women, an option the Home Office chose again not to implement. 

Immigration detention is optional so the Home Office is responsible for any woman miscarrying in detention.  The Home Office must do the right thing, urgently, and actually ban the detention of pregnant women as they run the real risk of another miscarriage in detention, for which they will be responsible.

• This text is an expanded version of ‘Ban the detention of pregnant women’ which appeared in The Guardian,  Tues 20 August 2019

5.30-8.30pm Tuesday 16th July 2019

Garden Court Chambers, 57-60 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Holborn, London, WC2A 3LJ.

Continue reading “Invitation : Medical Justice Annual General Meeting “ →

Monday 17th June from 4pm

Join us on the 10km walk on 17th June to raise funds for Medical Justice to help immigration detainees get much-needed medical evidence and support to access free legal advice. Continue reading “Medical Justice on the London Legal Walk” →

21st March 2019

Mr A and Mr AT were both removed from the UK. The Home Office was ordered to bring them back. The BBC2 Victoria Derbyshire programme interviewed them both yesterday, together with Theresa Schleicher of Medical Justice. Watch the interview here which starts at It starts at 46 mins 41 secs.
Continue reading “Removal windows case : BBC2 Victoria Derbyshire programme interviews two men removed from the UK” →

14^th March 2019 Medical Justice press statement for immediate release

High Court suspends unscrupulous policy of removing unwanted migrants from the UK without warning

The Home Office removals policy enabling it to refuse a migrant’s case and forcibly remove them from the UK, within hours and in many cases without access to legal representation, was suspended by a High Court judge today, potentially tearing the heart out of the government’s “hostile environment” strategy against migrants.

Continue reading “High Court suspends unscrupulous policy of removing unwanted migrants from the UK without warning” →

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Wednesday 6 March

Joint press release with Freedom From Torture and the Helen Bamber Foundation

In a landmark judgment, the Supreme Court has ruled that the lower courts were wrong to override the conclusions of a medical expert when considering forensic evidence of torture in an asylum claim.

Continue reading “Supreme Court reasserts the role of medical experts in asylum claims by torture survivors” →