Refugee Tales: Why stories of indefinite detention in UK should shock us all

The UK is the only country in western Europe that detains refugees for indefinite periods – with one man held for nine years, abandoned and forgotten by the system

This summer, ‘Refugee Tales’ marks its tenth anniversary. Described as a “walk in solidarity with refugees, people seeking asylum and people who have experienced immigration detention”, it is modelled on Chaucer’s great poem of movement and narrative, the Canterbury Tales.

The project was founded to call out the fact that the UK is the only country in western Europe that detains people indefinitely under immigration rules. Our call is for a future without detention and, as an urgent first step, an immediate end to indefinite detention.

The way we make this call is by sharing stories of people who have been detained, in the context of large-scale, public walks. Some are told in the first person or, where their identity must be protected, in collaboration with writers.

A protester communicates with people held inside the Brook House Immigration Removal Centre near Gatwick Airport (Picture: Niklas Halle'n) | AFP via Getty Images

Cruel and dehumanising

The project is based on two straightforward observations: that indefinite detention is a cruel and dehumanising process, fundamentally in breach of a person’s human rights; and that when human rights are abused, people’s stories are silenced, and therefore those stories must be heard.

The facts of the situation are shocking in themselves. In 2024, more than 20,000 people were detained indefinitely in the UK. This number is down from the 32,000 when Refugee Tales first walked in 2015 but, having dipped, the numbers are rising again.

Arbitrary as the process is, periods of detention vary. A person might be held for days or weeks, but periods of months and years are not uncommon. The longest period that Refugee Tales knows of involved a man who was ‘found’ by HM Inspector of Prisons in Lincoln Prison, having been abandoned to and by the system. He had been incarcerated for nine years.

Periods of over two years are a common occurrence, as is re-detention after release. One man who Refugee Tales walks with, who fled slavery in his home country, and only finally won his case for asylum after more than a decade, was held in all ten immigration removal centres in the UK. Since securing his release, he has gained a first-class degree in social work. The trauma of having been detained is with him every day.

We could pile up the statistics. Consider that whereas the Home Office’s rationale for detention is that it is for “administrative purposes” pending removal, more than 60 per cent of those held are in fact released, begging the question why they were held in the first place.

But it is their stories, more than the figures, that tell the truth. Through the stories, we have learned that in detention, where two people often share a cell with an open toilet, people can be locked in their cells for over 12 hours a day.

Mock deportations

We learned of people being taken to a bus that would lead to their deportation – to the country which they were forced to leave – only to be told they were not being removed at all, and that their parade to the bus had been a terrifying ‘joke’. It was through the stories that we heard about a man seeking asylum who didn’t receive urgent medical attention because the doctor could not treat someone the removal centre staff refused to unchain.

Story after story, what the five volumes of Refugee Tales document is a systematically abusive process. But the project is hardly the only source. Two years ago, a report was published following a public inquiry into abuses at the Brook House Immigration Removal Centre.

The inquiry was triggered by a 2017 BBC Panorama programme in which a centre guard, using a hidden camera, exposed the shocking hostility of other staff. As the report’s author, Kate Eves, put it, “the documentary portrayed Brook House as violent, dysfunctional and unsafe. It showed the use of abusive, racist and derogatory language by some staff towards those in their care… the use of force by staff on mentally and physically unwell detained people.”

Despite having found 19 breaches of article three of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits “torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”, the report’s recommendations have met with no discernible improvements. Nor has any thought been given to Kate Eves’ suggestion that the findings might have “wider application”.

‘Island of strangers’

Now, surely, is a moment to reflect. The UK’s practice of detention underpins an asylum regime designed to produce almost total social exclusion; witness the fact that people seeking asylum are not allowed to work.

It is a social exclusion that becomes self-fulfilling and, in the minds of politicians, comes to justify brutal political pronouncements. Barely a week has gone by in the past ten years without a further criminalising or vilifying of so-called ‘migrants’.

Nor should we think that such language doesn’t have material effects. Two days after the Prime Minister’s chilling “island of strangers” speech earlier this month, a man in his 60s, who has walked with Refugee Tales since it started, was subjected to a violent, racist attack. It is hard to think of a more charitable man. He sought sanctuary in the UK because, in the country he fled, he had been persecuted for defending human rights.

As Refugee Tales marks its tenth anniversary, it sets out, once again, to picture a language of welcome, and to call for a politics grounded in human rights. Detention is a scandal that depends on the silencing of stories. As Refugee Tales walks, it calls for those stories to be heard.

David Herd is co-organiser of Refugee Tales. His book, Writing Against Expulsion, is out in paperback.