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Shortly
after 9.30am on 5 August, last year, four children
and their mother were escorted by immigration and
security officers aboard a flight from Stansted to
Frankfurt. The Ay family were, to use Home
Office-speak, failed asylum seekers, so they had to
be removed, like a stain, from British soil.
Beriwan, then 14, Newroz, 13, Dilovan, 12,
eight-year-old Medya and their mother, Yurdugal, had
spent four years, one month and 17 days in this
country. The first three years were the best of the
children's lives. They lived in Gravesend, Kent,
made friends, excelled at school. But when the Home
Office got round to processing their asylum
application, it was rejected. Mr Ay, a Kurd who'd
fled Turkey with his wife 15 years previously, was
immediately deported to Germany then onto his
homeland and hasn't been heard of.
Meanwhile, Mrs Ay lodged a claim in her name. It,
too, was rejected but because of her fears of being
sent to Turkey - a country none of her children had
set foot in and which has an appalling record of
human rights abuses against Kurds - she appealed.
New Labour had not long tightened immigration laws
so that families with children could be detained
without time limit and under the same rules as
adults. Mrs Ay was deemed a 'serial absconder' who
had 'committed immigration sins'. She and her
children were locked up at Dungavel detention
centre, a former prison. For one year and 19 days
the children and their mother shared one small room,
into which they were shut for 22 hours a day.
A respected emeritus professor of child and
adolescent psychiatry at University College, London,
examined the children after six months and concluded
they were effectively being held as prisoners in a
high-security jail. In Scotland, someone accused of
murder or rape can be held for only 110 days without
trial. According to other medical experts all the
children suffered psychological trauma. Newroz's
hair began to fall out; she developed a hand tremor;
stopped eating; and effectively stopped talking.
Teachers in Kent had described her as an exceptional
pupil.
Dilovan became confrontational and withdrawn; Medya
tearful and clingy. Even Beriwan, initially the most
robust, began to lose her resilience.
I first visited the Ay family in July 2003. I'd
brought sweets and toiletries but couldn't give them
to the children because, said the guard, there was
alcohol in the shampoo and nail polish, and the
sweet boxes could, for all she knew, contain drugs.
I was escorted to the visiting room where I met four
of the most well-mannered, articulate, intelligent
and endearing children I've ever come across, who
told me the things they missed: going out to play
(they were allowed outdoors between 3pm and 5pm);
friends; school; fruit; their father. Dilovan, who
dreamt of being a footballer, was upset because he
had no-one to play the beautiful game with. Newroz
wanted to become a doctor; Beriwan, a lawyer or a
journalist.
When I asked Mrs Ay why she did not abandon her
fight to remain in the UK, she looked at me with a
kind of sorrowful envy. 'I am terrified of what
might happen to me and my children in Turkey,' she
said, shaking her head.
The plight of the Ay family provoked outrage in
Scotland. Church and union leaders, cross-party
politicians, children's charities and human rights
organisations condemned their treatment, arguing
that it breached international law. Most tellingly,
Anne Owers, the government's own Chief Inspector of
Prisons, stated that children should be detained in
exceptional circumstances only and for no more than
a matter of days.
Pleas for them to be granted bail fell on deaf ears.
Battered by a right-wing press, Home Secretary David
Blunkett and then Immigration Minister Beverley
Hughes, were determined to demonstrate that their
government had a firm grip on this most
controversial of political issues.
The Ay children were among their victims. Last week,
they received the first bit of good news in their
15-year search for stability. Germany, the country
which initially rejected the family's asylum
application, has granted them on humanitarian ground
temporary leave to remain based on the trauma the
children suffered during their detention in the UK.
That detention was justified on the grounds that
they were at risk of absconding. Yet, during the
year in which their case has been processed in
Germany they have enjoyed relative freedom. In other
words, they were never at risk of absconding and,
irrespective of the rights or wrongs of the case,
they should never have been treated in such a
disgusting way.
The Home Office, despite pressure from politicians
and campaigners, won't release annual figures of
asylum seeker children held in detention centres.
Nor will they publish the length of time children
are locked up. Only, less incriminating, the number
of children detained on a particular date.
According to the charity Bail for Immigration
Detainees, the only organisation to have carried out
research into the detention of families, there has
been a six-fold increase in the number of children
detained.
Their experiences are rarely heard. But it is
necessary to try to keep a light shining on their
stories in the hope that some day soon the shameful
and inhumane, not to mention expensive, policy of
locking up vulnerable, traumatised children without
limit of time is consigned to history.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk
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