A mass deportation charter flight is set to remove up to 100 people from the UK to Nigeria and Ghana on the 23rd March 2017.
“These charter flights are modern slavery”
Detainees are speaking out against the upcoming charter flight, part of the regular Home Office practice of forcibly removing people en masse on privately chartered ghost flights that leave from an undisclosed location in the middle of the night. On the basis of previous charter flight reports from Stansted, it is assumed the companies contracted to operate this flight are Titan Airways and Tascor, departing at 22.30hrs.
- Some have been here for over 10 years.
- Some will leave children and partners behind.
- Some have asylum claims and fear for their lives upon removal.
- Some have legal cases pending. The deportation will stop them accessing their rights.
- Many cannot afford to pay the huge legal fees to regularise their stay.
Those facing deportation include some of the 35 people who weren’t removed as scheduled from the UK after groups End Deportations, LGSM & Plane Stupid came together at the end of March to stop the last charter flight to Nigeria & Ghana.
One man with who has been re-issued a ticket for the charter flight has an ongoing case, as part of his wife and children’s asylum claim. William (not his real name) has been a resident in the UK for over 14 years, and was held in detention for over 6 months, before being released and detained again last week. His youngest daughter recently turned 8 and regularly wakes up from nightmares where she is separated from her Dad. Whilst the Home Office have acknowledged that William has an ongoing case, they have failed to cancel his ticket and are proceeding with his unlawful deportation. At both of his month recent bail hearings, the judges have granted bail, but the Home Office have refused to give consent, which resulted in William continuing to be detained and face deportation.
“Having to deal with coming off a chartered flight the embarrassment, the sly racial comments and the hand gestures when your looking out the bus window, watching your so called escorts laugh and put their middle fingers up”
Last week, the British High Commissioner in Nigeria issued a letter in response to the protest in Lagos, saying that the UK only enforces removal once nationality has been determined, when people are medically fit to fly, and after people have exhausted all legal avenues to remain in the UK. As William’s situation evidences, and as we have reported in the past, the UK does not meet its own requirements and continues to remove people en mass unlawfully.
What is a charter flight, and who is on one?
“Charter flights” refer to the well-established Home Office practice of hiring a whole (private) aircraft to forcibly remove multiple people against their will at one time – most commonly around 60-80 people (but can be up to 100). The only people on these flights are deportees* and Tascor security guards, without independent monitoring or documentation of what takes place on the way to the airport, during the flight, and after landing.
Known Home Office charter flights currently operate to Nigeria, Ghana, Pakistan and Albania, whilst it looks incredibly likely that charter flights will start up again to Afghanistan. These charter flights have been known to stop off in other countries within the EU, such as Belgium, to pick up more detainees on the way.
These mass deportations are often used to forcibly remove people to countries which receive few commercial flights from the UK – because they are countries it is considered especially dangerous to fly to – and therefore countries which people may be especially scared to return to, demonstrated by the story of one woman who swallowed all of the medication she had instantly upon landing in Nigeria.
Bimonthly charter flights to Nigeria and Ghana (named “Operation Majestic” by the Home Office) are often made up of a mixture of people who have had their asylum claims rejected by the Home Office (whilst some still have ongoing claims), people who may have spent their whole life in the UK but lack British citizenship, and, after being convicted for a crime and serving a prison sentence longer than 12 months, are subsequently transferred to immigration detention and given deportation orders to a country they know nothing about and may have never lived in, and people who are labeled as “overstayers” by the Home Office.
Many on charter flights have been given the “right” to appeal once they have been deported, which is used by the Home Office to in part to justify the use of charter flights. From The Unity Centre’s experience of continued contact with individuals given out of country appeal rights, it is clear that these circumstances essentially mean that an individual has no right of appeal, given the enormous obstacles that stand in the way. The Unity Centre is currently is contact with at least one individual who is pursuing an out of country appeal – who, upon being forcibly removed to Bangladesh, is street homeless and severely ill – meaning that he is unable to even afford enough phone credit to call a lawyer in the UK.
Individuals that The Unity Centre have been in contact with over the past years on charter flights range from people who have lived in the UK for over 20 years with their partner, children and whole family here, to people who were forcibly removed to a country which was not their country of origin, to people who are torture survivors and should not lawfully be detained or removed, to people who were put onto charter planes despite how their serious mental and physical meant that it was highly dangerous for them to fly. One person who was forcibly removed on a previous charter flight this year came to the UK from Nigeria aged 14, but the Home Office failed to recognise him as a dependent of his mother (who now has British citizenship), and he was forced to leave her, his siblings and long-term partner – with whom he was moving in with when he was detained. Charter flights enable individuals with extremely convincing reasons for staying in the UK to be removed en mass with very few questions asked.
Detainees are calling for raised public awareness of how they are treated and the use of charter flights. One woman in Yarl’s Wood detention centre said: “It really reminds us of the history you read about slaves. When they used to take people and put them in the ships, to take them and go and sell them. Now, they are doing this here. Yarl’s Wood is a slave ship. They take you from here and put you on a charter flight.”
Why does the Home Office use charter flights?
In an article in The Telegraph (2009), David Wood (then current UK Border Agency Director of Enforcement) explained why the Home Office began using charter flights in 2001: “It was a response to the fact that some of those being deported realised that if they made a big enough fuss at the airport – if they took off their clothes, for instance, or started biting and spitting – they could delay the process. We found that pilots would then refuse to take the person on the grounds that other passengers would object. So although we still use scheduled flights, we use special flights for individuals who are difficult to remove and might cause trouble.”
Whilst Wood’s assertion that charter flights are used specifically for difficult individuals, it is clear that charter flights are used only for individuals of a certain nationality – and that this is what defines the people on a charter flight. The Home Office does not gather together identified “difficult” detainees, but rather collects people from the same “country of origin” – regardless of how these people are at completely different stages within the asylum/immigration system. For example, George was forcibly removed last July, in spite of having more than a week left to appeal the refusal of his EEA application to remain in the UK with his pregnant partner.
Charter flights are incredibly difficult to challenge, specifically due to the simple fact that they are specially chartered by the Home Office; for example, in a letter addressed to an individual facing forced removal in 2014, the Home Office states that due to the “effort and expense” of a charter flight, a judicial review (of Home Office practice – which has been successful for over 36% people seeking asylum) may not necessarily defer forced removal. In doing so, the Home Office simultaneously contradicts its own assertion that charter flights are cost-effective (the average cost per person being removed in 2015 was over £5000). Whilst Detained Fast Track was ruled unlawful, from speaking to detainees it is clear that similar barriers to accessing justice through legal representation persist – and that the Home Office is deliberately using its powers to limit those that most need legal protection.
Wood’s claim that “difficult” detainees necessitate “special flights” directly implies the misuse of force and violence on charter flights. In arguing that commercial flights are problematic for forcibly removing people successfully, Wood indicates how security guards and immigration officers on board charter flights are able to abide by different rules and break Home Office policy when enforcing removal, away from public scrutiny (the flights do not appear on airport flight schedules, and detainees do not know the whereabouts of departure). If practices of restraint are excessive and violent enough to kill Jimmy Mubenga on a commercial British Airways flight, what are they like on a private charter?
What happens in the lead up to and during a charter flight?
We often do not know what takes place on a charter flight, which is precisely the Home Office’s aim! Beginning in 2001, charter flights continued for a decade before independent inspectors were allowed on board in 2011 (and has happened twice since then: in 2013 and 2015). Upon return, many go into hiding in fear for their lives, are immediately street homeless, or may be taken straight to prison from the airport – and thus it is incredibly difficult to maintain contact with people who have been deported.
However, we do know that, a few days before the scheduled flight, detainees are moved to detention centres situated around London; they are locked up in solitary confinement the night before (and often before that) – believed to be an attempt by the Home Office to avoid collective resistance to removal. One detainee who was previously awaiting forced removal on a charter flight to Pakistan said: “Yesterday we moved to short stay side of the centre because of our flight, they closed our room door at 8pm and then didn’t open…I can’t stay one more night in that room, I am sure I will die because the room is so small and we are two boys in there and the air in the room is not enough for two people.”
In the afternoon, detainees are taken (often with force) from detention, handcuffed, and put onto coaches bound for the airport. “Reserve” detainees are kept on coaches, unaware if they are being put on the plane or not until after the flight has actually left – demonstrating the Home Office’s clear emphasis on filling the flight regardless of detainees’ individual cases. Standard practice is that each person facing removal is accompanied by two Tascor security “escorts”; so, for a flight forcibly removing 80 people, there would be 160 guards present. Handcuffed detainees are forced onto the plane under the threat of violence, often with unnecessary and excessive wrist and waist restraint belts, which are often kept on continuously for the whole journey, with head restraints for those who attempt to resist (brought in following the death of Jimmy Mubenga in 2010). One independent report found that the use of waist restraints, which circulate around the entire body and hold one’s hands and arms firmly by one side, is not according to the Home Office guidelines of exceptional circumstances – but have instead become routine – not only for those who resist, but for those who do not too.
Deportees from a charter flight to Nigeria and Ghana back in May 2016 told The Unity Centre how 8 Tascor security guards restrained and physically forced one man onto the flight. Another person, deported to Nigeria via a commercial Virgin Atlantic flight earlier this year, told The Unity Centre how he did not physically resist onboard the flight, but made it clear to other passengers and the accompanying guards that he was being forcibly removed against his will, and that he had a partner and young child in the UK. In response, Tascor guards applied forceful pressure to his joints: to his wrists, left knee and left thumb. No passenger took action or offered support. For the duration of the flight Terry was restrained around his waist and wrists. Terry says he left the plane in Nigeria in serious pain: his wrists were swollen and he walked with a limp. He says he took more than two weeks to recover and had no money to see a doctor.
Clearly, no one resisting on a charter flights wants to “delay the process” as Wood argues (and as a result spend longer imprisoned in immigration detention); rather, they are extremely fearful of being forcibly returned to a country from which they previously fled, or have strong reasons to want to remain in the UK.
In the case of Nigeria, once the plane has landed at the naval base in Lagos – after hours and hours of travelling – aggressive Nigerian immigration officials conduct lengthy individual interviews at the front of the plane, with no confidentiality. Individuals are made to go through the frightening and degrading process of Nigerian immigration officials demanding bribes in order to let them go. In many cases, police officers (of the country of destination) enter the plane upon landing, and using force, eject anyone who is reluctant to leave the cabin and enter a country they once fled from, or never step foot in before.
What is the role of the receiving country?
The consent of the country (to which detainees face deportation to) is required in order to issue detainees with emergency travel documents, and allow detainees to disembark upon arrival. Movement for Justice have drawn attention to the importance of targeting receiving countries’ embassies and high commissions, calling on the Nigerian government to refuse to accept charter flights and allow them to land.
The Nigerian High Commission states that “before any Nigerian is deported, the High Commission always insists that: their citizenship has been proved beyond reasonable doubt; they are medically fit; they are allowed to exhaust all their legal remedies; for those who have stayed in the UK for more than 15 years, proof of existence of friends and relations as well as capacity to reintegrate.”
This statement can be understood to be completely false, as the Nigerian government is paid by the Home Office to interview people in detention and issue them with emergency travel documents – even when these conditions have not been met. The corruption of the Nigerian Government by the UK was alluded to by David Cameron himself. The Unity Centre has seen copious numbers of individuals that fail to meet these requirements. Ola (not his real name) was born in Belgium (with a Belgium birth certificate), and had lived in the UK for 17 years before he was deported last November to Nigeria – despite having no connections to the country (with no family or records there), and the fact that the Nigerian High Commission previously refused to issue travel documents for him in 2013. Detainees are often identified as Nigerian by the High Commission based on arbitrary indicators such as the markings on their face. In some cases, it has even been acknowledged by the Nigerian High Commission that individuals being issued with travel documents are not Nigerian, as one detainee said he was greeted by Mrs. Ngere, a Deputy Immigration Officer, as her “Eritrean brother”.
The Unity Centre has been in contact with individuals who have been so unsuitable to fly that, in one instance, a detainee was taken to the airport in an ambulance, and subsequently deported on a charter flight. Upon request of the Home Office, the Nigerian High Commission issue travel documents to individuals (both inside and outside of detention) regardless of what stage they have reached in their immigration case – demonstrating their disregard of whether someone has “exhaust[ed] all their legal remedies” or not. Whilst the Nigerian High Commission claims to examine the relations someone may hold to the country they face deportation to, theyfail to acknowledge the immediate family members one has in the UK, such as a partner and children. Ray (not his real name) stated: “Immigration Judges tell us we can maintain our family life over Skype. But how can you take your child to school through Skype? How can you have a relationship with your wife over Skype?”
What you can do!
The Unity Centre calls on all supporters to take immediate action to show opposition to the scheduled charter flight to Nigeria and Ghana on May 23rd 22:30hrs, and voice opposition to the presumed airline, Titan Airways. In choosing to take contracts with the Home Office, Titan Airways is complicit in forcibly removing people from the UK against their will, profiting from the violence and assault that takes place on board. It is necessary for this company to understand that there is strong opposition to the racist immigration policies they facilitate through operating these charter flights.
Charter flights are much more difficult than commercial flights for individuals facing deportation (or those surrounding) to resist, so anything anyone who is not on the flight is able to do can really make a difference.
– Direct action! Anything to delay the coaches and flight, as gaining time for people with removal directions means that their solicitor may have time to legally act to stop them from being removed. There are instances where detainees have not been deported, simply because there is not enough time to take everyone on the list from detention to the airport, and so some are left behind in order to avoid further delay.
– Target receiving countries! Protest and bombard Embassies and High Commissions, and tell them not to give the UK government authorisation and access to land charter flights. Tell the Nigerian High Commission that we know that they do not adhere to their own requirements for issuing travel documents, and that they must be responsible for checking that the UK government act lawfully in deporting people.
– Campaign against Titan Airways! Titan Airways has won the BACA Best Passenger Charter Airline Award on multiple occasions “and today has the prestigious reputation of the Airline of Choice for a wide variety of air charter services worldwide.” Tell Titan Airways to not collude with the Home Office in forcibly removing people against their will and not to be complicit in the violence that takes place on these charter flights. As in Germany, enough campaigning could force the airline to abandon this contract, and discourage other airlines from building relationships with the Home Office.
– Campaign against Tascor! Multiple deportees have told The Unity Centre that, after applying physical force or restraints to them during the removal flight, guards often begin “casually chatting”, telling people being deported that their jobs are “simply to effect deportation” and that they are “just doing their jobs”. These instances demonstrate the clear denial of complicity by those who collaborate with the Home Office’s and carry out their unjust and violent deportation regime.
– Publicise that this charter flight is taking place! In line with the Home Office’s aims, most people don’t know that regular ghost flights leave the UK, sending people to countries they are scared to return to, or may have never known, and violently taking them away from family and lives in the UK.