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Deportation Death Raises Questions Over 'Proportionate Force'

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  • Deportation Death Raises Questions Over 'Proportionate Force'

    DEPORTATION DEATH RAISES QUESTIONS OVER 'PROPORTIONATE FORCE'
    Matthew Taylor

    guardian.co.uk
    Thursday 14 October 2010 20.19 BST

    Death of Jimmy Mubenga on a flight to Angola is first death during
    deportation for 17 years

    Jimmy Mubenga, who lost consciousness while the flight deporting him
    was on the runway at Heathrow. Photograph: Public domain

    Whatever happened on flight BA77 on Tuesday night, the death of
    Jimmy Mubenga is likely to place a spotlight on Britain's deportation
    techniques. The 46-year-old is thought to be the first person to have
    died in the process of being deported for 17 years.

    The last death - that of Joy Gardner, who police tried to restrain in
    her north London flat - proved hugely inflammatory. She was bound and
    gagged by police using 13 feet of sticky tape as she resisted their
    attempts to deport her in July 1993.

    A jury found two police officers not guilty of her manslaughter during
    a trial two years later. The officers said that Gardner, aged 40,
    had become extremely violent.

    Her death stirred up community tension in an area of north London
    that had only recently recovered from the Broadwater Farm estate
    riots in 1985.

    Since then deportation has remained highly controversial. In a report
    produced for the Home Office in March this year, Lady Nuala O'Loan
    found complaints about abuse during detention were not being properly
    investigated and that private security firms were not adequately
    managing the use of force by their staff.

    Her inquiry was prompted by a report in 2008, in which medical
    practitioners and lawyers documented what they said was "widespread
    and seemingly systematic abuse" of detainees being forcibly deported
    by private contractors. O'Loan did not share that particular finding.

    However she clearly sympathised with some concerns raised by the
    report's authors, which included Birnberg Peirce, Medical Justice and
    the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns. O'Loan looked
    in detail at 29 of the 48 cases in which complaints had been made
    and found an inadequate or no investigation at all had been carried
    out by UK Border Agency in 18 cases.

    In some cases staff were shown not to have even considered whether
    the use of force had been "proportionate or necessary" before applying
    handcuffs or other restraint techniques.

    The 2008 report, Outsourcing Abuse, evaluated 300 allegations of
    assaults during deportations between 2004 and 2008. The authors found
    one asylum seeker ended up with his leg in a plaster while another
    - a woman - was pushed through the airport after having allegedly
    been assaulted.

    One man, an Armenian, claimed to have suffered a punctured lung after
    being kicked and stamped on as he tried to resist deportation by
    clinging to railings at Heathrow airport. Another, a failed asylum
    seeker from Cameroon, suffered a dislocated knee while, he alleged,
    a guard told him: "You will go to your fucking country today, we will
    fucking show you what illegal people deserve in our country."

    In both cases complaints were made to police, who decided there
    was no case to answer. Nearly half of the alleged assaults - 48% -
    occurred in the airport before the detainee was taken to the plane,
    while around a quarter took placed "on the aeroplane before take-off".




    From: A. Papazian
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