No Borders Demo - Saturday April 8th @ Harmondsworth

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COACHES are being organised and other transport from around the country.
Please contact London No Borders at:  noborderslondon@riseup.net or call
07944 135 617
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London No Borders, London against Detention and The Square Occupied Social Centre are calling for a demonstration at Harmonsdworth Detention Centre near Heathrow.

Even as the barriers to the free movement of capital come down, the border regimes are expanding and intensifying. In response to this growing repression, grassroots networks of asylum seekers, migrants, and their supporters are developing across the UK and Europe. There are anti-deportation struggles and campaigns to shut down detention and reporting centres. Undocumented workers are organising. Detainees have staged mass hunger strikes and physically resisted their deportations. In the UK we are attempting to develop a radical network of people opposed to borders (internal and external).

One of the most brutal and dehumanising aspects of immigration systems and border regimes is the imprisonment of thousands of people in detention centres throughout the EU and around the world. In the UK the capacity and use of arbitrary detention has expanded massively over the past few years, with whole families imprisoned in places like Yarl’s Wood.

The experience of being detained (without trial and with no automatic bail review), often after experiences of torture and trauma in the countries they are fleeing from, pushes many over the edge, and is viewed as a further experience of torture at the hands of a country they thought would be a refuge. The policy of detention has led to 12 suicides among detainees in the UK, including this January, the death of Bereket Yohannes, a 26-year-old Eritrean man facing deportation who was found hanged in Harmondsworth detention centre, near Heathrow.

Many detainees at Harmondsworth, neighbouring Colnbrook, and other detention cenres claim to have been abused – assaults during removal attempts, lack of medical care, denial of medication, access to independent doctors, and obstruction in trying to handle their legal matters – e.g. interference with post and blocked access to phone. Allegations of a Uganda woman being reduced to a state of mental collapse during seven months in Yarl’s Wood detention centre has triggered an enquiry by the HM Prisons Inspectors team into healthcare provision of detainees there following the catalogue of suicides and alleged mistreatment in detention centres.

Conditions in detention are not changing, and the government has made it clear that they intend, in coming years, to detain increasing numbers of people. In several countries, campaigns, actions and demonstrations have succeeded in shutting down individual detention centres and provoking public and political discussion on the use of detention. It is therefore vital to have a sustained campaign against detention centres, the private profit making companies that run them and the Home Office from whom their contracts are issued; to support those inside, to draw attention to their existence, and to call for every detention centre to be shut down.

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COACHES are being organised and other transport from around the country. Please contact London No Borders at:  noborderslondon@riseup.net or call 07944 135 617