Migrants commit suicide in abandoned UK detention centers: Report
A new report has shown that the United Kingdom is becoming increasingly careless of the situation of migrants in its detention centers as more people commit suicide or need emergency medical care for drug overdose.
The Guardian said in a report on Wednesday that the number of ambulance callouts to migrant detention centers in England had increased by almost 50 percent in a three-year period ending last year.
Almost 10 ambulances visited detention centers each week in 2017, a sharp rise of 43 percent compared to 2014, the newspaper said.
Most of those calls came because of problems such as drug overdose and suicide attempts as migrants continued to face difficult conditions in the facilities, said the report.
The rise in emergency care services to migrant facilities comes as England has hosted fewer migrants in those centers compared to three years ago.
Experts put the rise down to the deteriorating state of detention centers, with little attention being paid to people’s wellbeing. They said an end to indefinite detention was long overdue.
“Levels of suicide and self-harm are unacceptably high and we see people on a daily basis who are in need of care and should never be locked up. That they are with such little attention paid to their wellbeing,” said Celia Clarke, the director of the charity Bail for Immigration Detainees.
The rights campaigner said the findings by the Guardian were quite “shocking” and proved the fact that the UK government had deliberately abandoned the migrants in line with its general policy of reducing immigration numbers.
David Lammy, a senior lawmaker at the opposition Labour Party, said the report showed that the UK government had no intention of reforming its migrant policy to make it more “humane”.
“What this shows is our treatment of those detained is cruel, inhumane and detrimental to their health,” said Lammy, adding, that the situation in detention camps was a clear sign of the Conservative-led government’s “abhorrent scale of negligence”.
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