The Home Office has been accused of unlawfully segregating asylum seekers from the local population based on their nationality by “falsely imprisoning” them on a remote Essex airbase.
A legal challenge launched by the charity Care4Calais against the home secretary, Suella Braverman, has warned that about 200 people accommodated at Wethersfield airbase are being subjected to “segregation by nationality”. Many living at the base, which is almost 12 miles from the nearest town, Braintree, come from countries including Eritrea and Afghanistan, while the majority of the population in villages close to the base are white.
Asylum seekers have been accommodated at the site since 12 July. The base is ringed by security fences and monitored 24/7 by on-site security guards and CCTV. There are no pavements on the roads around the site and no public transport.
In a pre-action protocol letter issued by lawyers representing the charity, the home secretary is accused of failing to meet the requirements of certain sections of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 to provide an adequate standard of accommodation. They say the isolated, fenced-in conditions at Wethersfield may amount to detention and make it “effectively impossible for residents to interact with the local community”.
Braverman is accused of breaching her statutory powers by segregating asylum seekers from the rest of the population “in circumstances likely to lead to their stigmatisation, degradation or loss of dignity”. People at Wethersfield have told the charity that living there “feels like being imprisoned”.
The charity says the case has implications for the government’s use of other mass accommodation sites for asylum seekers, such as the Bibby Stockholm barge in Portland, Dorset, and RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire.
A second ground in the legal challenge centres on the absence of an effective screening process to identify those with vulnerabilities that would make them unsuitable to be housed at Wethersfield, such as survivors of torture or trafficking. Care4Calais says that people with these vulnerabilities are routinely being sent to the airbase.
The government has been asked to respond to the legal letter by 7 November before proceedings for a full judicial review are initiated.
Steve Smith, CEO of Care4Calais, said: “What we are witnessing is a form of segregation. This current government has given up on any pretence of trying to integrate asylum seekers into UK society, by putting them in de facto prison camps and barges.
“Falsely imprisoning asylum seekers behind barbed-wire fences, placing them under 24/7 surveillance, restricting their liberty and separating them from any semblance of community is now the chosen policy of this government. We believe it is unlawful.”
The Home Office has been approached for comment.
