Protests For Tolerance

 Thousands of Germans demonstrated in in Berlin, Stuttgart, Cologne and Dresden on Monday

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.