The tragic death of Jimmy Mubenga (Mubenga jury not told of guards’ racist texts, 18 December) highlights the inhumane treatment of migrants in the UK. Regardless of immigration status, we should afford all members of our society with dignity. The UK remains the only EU country to detain people indefinitely for immigration purposes and allows the use of pain-based removal techniques. Citizens UK is calling for an end to both of these practices. Criminals and suspected terrorists can be held for a maximum of 28 days, but immigrants – guilty only of trying to gain safety and stability – are held indefinitely while civil servants process paperwork. This is costly in terms of footing the bill for expensive, high-security, prison-like facilities and for compensation. In the past three years, £15m in damages has been paid to unlawfully held migrants. Most important, there is the high human cost when people don’t know how long they are going to be locked up for, with the threat of a painful, enforced removal in the background.
These practices are at odds with the UK our members are proud to call home. This isn’t a call for an open-door immigration policy, but a request to ensure our processes allow dignity for families seeking sanctuary.
Jonathan Cox
Citizens UK
• The Mubenga case will go down as one that will not reassure our minorities. Many regard it as a perverse verdict, even discounting the withholding of the vile texts from the jury. After hearing conflicting evidence, the jury accepted the assurances of the accused that they, the nearest to Mr Mubenga, hadn’t heard his cries of “I can’t breathe”, or held him folded up for any length of time.
Defending counsel argued that along with racist texts against Africans on the phones of two defendants were a mass of offensive “jokes” on Stuart Tribelnig’s phone “at the expense of almost every imaginable minority”, but in the eyes of the judge all content of the texts was irrelevant. This was contrary to the coroner’s verdict, which was also withheld from the jury.
The fate of Eric Garner (A powerful new cry for US justice: ‘I can’t breathe’, 5 December) shows that the justice system on both sides of the pond are struggling to reassure minorities they are equal before the law when it comes to dispensing justice.
Eddie Dougall
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
