against racism and xenophobia and to instead promote a
message of tolerance. Businesses, churches, the city Cologne’s power company
and others kept their buildings and other facilities dark in solidarity with
the demonstrations against the ongoing protests by the group calling itself
Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West, or Pegida.
“You’re taking part in an action that, from its roots and
also from speeches, one can see is Nazi-ist, racist and extremist,” Cologne
Cathedral provost Norbert Feldhoff saidon tv. “And you’re supporting people you really don’t want to support.”
German chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans to stay away
from the Dresden rallies. When the Pegida demonstrators chant “we are the
people,” Merkel said “they actually mean ‘you don’t belong because of your
religion or your skin.
Migrants in the UK are being held in detention for years on
end, despite not facing any charges. one man has been detained for almost five
years. Four people have been held for more than three years – longer than some
of the high-profile Britons, such as Moazzam Begg, who were locked up by the US
in Guantanamo Bay. 3,378 people detained “solely under Immigration Act powers”
in immigration removal centres such as Yarl’s Wood, which has faced repeated
allegations of sexual misconduct by staff against prisoners and pregnant women
held without justification. And detainees are also kept in “short-term holding
facilities” and “pre-departure accommodation.” Most of those in detention are
asylum seekers, while others may be those whose visas may have run out, or
people who lived in Britain with indefinite leave to remain until being given a
deportation order, say campaigners. The problem is wider than even official
statistics suggest, with around 20,000 people being put in detention at some
point every year,
Jerome Phelps, director of Detention Action, told The
Independent: “These are shocking figures. The US has been widely condemned for
detention without trial in Guantanamo, yet the UK stands revealed as locking up
migrants for comparable periods in immigration detention centres. These people
are detained for deportation, but it stretches credibility to believe that it
can take more than four and a half years to deport someone.” He added “The Home
Office is simply warehousing unwanted migrants, at vast public expense, causing
incalculable damage to their mental health”. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/home-office-figures-show-migrants-detained-for-more-than-two-years-at-a-time-9959180.html
More than 60 per cent of migrants who are detained for more
than a year are ultimately released, not deported.
Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather is chairing a cross-party
inquiry into immigration detention which will produce its report next month
said “There can be no justification for locking people up for years and years
for no other reason than administrative convenience. Britain is alone in the EU
in not having a time-limit on how long people can be held in immigration
detention and these figures show that this allows officials in the Home Office
to deprive people of their liberty for years at a time.” Teather added: “The
evidence that the parliamentary inquiry into immigration detention that I am
currently chairing has heard has highlighted the immense human cost of this
policy. Not knowing if you are going to be released, deported back to a country
where you fear you will be tortured, or if you will languish in detention,
locked away from friends and family, for months and years to come leaves people
in a state of insecurity that effects both mental and physical health.”
One former detainee, Abdal, from Sudan, said: “I was
detained for three and a half years. It was worse than the physical torture I
experienced in my country, because with the physical torture you get a break
between beatings. You never know when the psychological pain of detention will
end.” He added added: “I now suffer panic attacks and flashbacks, and have been
diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. These are the consequences of
long-term detention. Detention has never served a purpose, what is the point of
ruining people’s lives?”
While the British Home Secretary, Theresa May, continues to
defend her plan to expel international students from Britain after graduation. Sir
James Dyson, the inventor and businessman, has said that May’s pledge to require
overseas students to leave the country and apply for a new visa if they wanted
to work in Britain as “a short-term vote winner that leads to long-term
economic decline”. His criticism echoed concerns about growing shortages of
qualified scientists and engineers in Britain from science and industry
leaders.
In the meantime, Cameron is warned by the European
commission that a central demand in his renegotiation of Britain’s EU
membership terms that EU citizens have a job offer before they travel to the UK
is likely to be rejected as unacceptable on the grounds that it risks infringing
the founding principle of the EU on the free movement of people. The commission
is preparing to let the prime minister know that the proposal would be
unworkable because it would be impossible to distinguish between EU jobseekers
and tourists entering the UK. It would also infringe the free movement of
people which allows EU citizens to travel and settle freely around the EU.
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