Free Movement deputy editor Conor James McKinney has been exploring the day-to-day workings of the immigration tribunals. Above is a discussion with Emily Dugan of BuzzFeed News, a journalist with a long-standing interest in immigration and asylum issues whose
latest report on the subject was published over the weekend. Below are CJ’s own impressions after a recent visit to the immigration bail list at Hatton Cross tribunal hearing centre.
“I hate this place”, David says fervently. A barrister from a prestigious London chambers, his dream Thursday morning clearly does not involve pacing a charmless tribunal corridor in the middle of a west London industrial estate. But then nobody at Hatton Cross, from the judges on down, seems particularly delighted to be here.
This hearing centre, hard by Heathrow airport, is one of the largest branches of the
First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) in the country. Hatton Cross — also known as Feltham — hears thousands of appeals against Home Office decisions every year. Among immigration lawyers, it is notorious for the bleakness of the setting and the harshness of its judges.
Other visitors are even less complimentary. One visiting journalist
wrote that the area “feels like somewhere where humans should not be. It’s like Worthing crossed with Bosnia. Grey, grotesquely scaled and administrative”. Frankly, I’m intrigued.
9.20am
Perhaps because the reports led me to expect something a bit more JG Ballard, the tribunal building itself doesn’t seem all that bad. The Royal Courts of Justice it ain’t, but the bland exterior and functional interior are nothing out of the ordinary. This is, after all, a country in which the justice budget is in the process of being
cut by 40% from one end of the decade to the other.
I’ve decided to sit in on immigration bail hearings. These involve a tribunal judge deciding on applications for release from people locked up in what are officially called immigration removal centres, such as nearby
Harmondsworth IRC. Most people seem to call them “detention” rather than “removal” centres, which is more accurate:
only a minority of those released from detention are actually removed from the UK. A recent Bar Council report suggested that, as a result, “detention is an immigration control tool that is failing at considerable and unnecessary human cost”.
Whatever the nomenclature, conditions in these places of imprisonment are
grim. Successful bail applicants are by no means free — their substantive immigration case will grind on, and they will be subject to
bail conditions designed to ensure that the Home...