Human rights group Liberty will tell the High Court today that vulnerable detainees were left in overcrowded, flooded cells without food or water while fires burned during a disturbance in Harmondsworth detention centre.
Liberty will also call for a public inquiry into the incident.
The human rights group is acting on behalf of individual detainees who claim that during the Harmondsworth disturbance in November 2006, they were denied food and water for up to 40 hours; locked in overcrowded, pitch-black rooms flooded with water for more than 24 hours; forced to urinate and defecate in front of each other; and strip searched in front of several officers.
Liberty’s Legal Officer Alex Gask, who brought the legal challenge, said yesterday: ‘These vulnerable men, detained for non-criminal reasons, were exposed to terrifying conditions and denied food and water during the disturbance because of systemic problems in the detention centre.
‘Only a public inquiry can expose the truth and provide lessons to prevent this shameful episode from recurring.’
One detainee told how he was taken to the centre’s medical clinic suffering from a bad back.
‘They just abandoned me,’ the man said. ‘There was no doctor and, when I asked where the doctor was, the detention officers laughed at me . . . One of them stepped on the hem of my trousers to make me fall over.
‘He then started laughing and called me a “fucking negro”.’
In January 2008, the Border and Immigration Agency’s race relations audit found that repeated patterns of alleged racist incidents at Harmondsworth detention centre were missed by the in-house investigation process and that regular taunting of detainees by some officers went unchallenged.
The disturbance in November 2006 allegedly began when some detainees challenged prison guards after they were not allowed to watch news coverage of a damning report on conditions in the centre by the HM Chief Inspector of Prisons (HMIP).
Four detainees were acquitted of conspiracy to commit violent disorder in February 2008.
Liberty is also challenging the Home Office and Kalyx Ltd (the contractor running the centre) over the appalling conditions of detention prior to the disturbance taking place.
Evidence from the individuals about the conditions in Harmondsworth substantiate the HMIP report, including:
• An individual with HIV/AIDs being ‘outed’ by prison officials and subsequently abused by other detainees.
• An individual with diabetes being denied insulin treatment.
• An individual with a visible skin disease bullied by prison officials.
• Arbitrary solitary confinement.
• No effective complaints procedure.
• Guards using racist taunts and beating detainees without provocation.
• Detainees beaten by guards for such behaviour as requesting the faxes sent to them by their lawyers.
The Home Office’s internal investigation into the disturbance, led by Robert Whalley and published in July 2007, found that, ‘the underlying causes are still there and, without any changes, the same thing could happen again at either establishment.’
