The government has announced that they will no longer lock up asylum seeking kids.

Coincidentally, I have the strangest sense of déjà vu…

We’ll have to wait and see if they’re got their fingers crossed behind their backs this time, too, or whether they’re actually capable of doing what they say they will.

Nick Clegg said:

The change prioritises doing the right thing over looking and sounding tough.. reforms which will give the UK one of the most child-friendly immigration systems in the developed world.

It’s great that the government finally recognises that imprisoning innocent children is inhumane, something which David Cameron apparently described as a “scandal”.

665 asylum seeking children have been held in detention in the past year alone, in centres which are notorious for their brutality and racism. This should never happen again. But are the new proposals any better?

According to the plans, no children will be detained as of May 2011. But why wait? It’s not like any government departments will need to be dismantled or any staff will need to be given notice and redundancy packages. This move doesn’t require six months of preparation – just stop putting children in jail.

And once the the changes are enacted, parents would still be detained in high security complexes but their children would be assigned minders so they can “move around freely”.

Um. What? So these already extremely vulnerable children are going to have to watch their parents be imprisoned for no reason, but it’s ok, because they’ll get a social worker/babysitter to allow them to continue their lives as normal? No part of that is either normal or acceptable. Besides which – young children like Wania Shabaz, who was eight months old when she was taken, don’t really do much moving around freely without their parents.

Imprisoning asylum seekers and taking their children into care until they’re forcibly deported to a country they don’t know is just as inhumane and unjustified as keeping the children in prison with their parents is.

Just let them stay.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 17th, 2010 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.