DOWNING STREET 4.20 PM THURSDAY 17 DECEMBER 2009
REFUGEE CHILDREN, PADDINGTON BEAR AND JEREMY CORBYN MP TO ASK PM TO STOP CHILD DETENTION
 
YOUNG refugees from Kosovo are due to deliver a petition to Number 10 Downing Street calling for the end of the government’s arrest and detention of asylum seeking children.
 
They will give Mr Brown a Paddington Bear with an extra luggage label attached, carrying Paddington’s words kindly forwarded to the children by Michael Bond.
 
"Whenever I hear about children from foreign countries being put into detention centres, I think how lucky I am to be living at number 32 Windsor Gardens with such nice people as Mr and Mrs Brown.

"Mrs Bird, who looks after the Browns, says if she had her way she would set the children free and lock up a few politicians in their place to see how they liked it!"

As well as the petition the children will also be delivering over 200 hand prints made by other children protesting that asylum seeking children are being locked up in prison-like conditions.
 
In only two months, more than 2600 people have signed the online petition, including Michael Bond and dozens of leading writers and illustrators, hundreds of health professionals, lawyers, teachers and social workers, Bishop Michael Campbell of Lancaster, Emma Thompson and Colin Firth. The St Vincent de Paul Society are committed to collecting signatures across the country on the paper petition. 70 signatures were collected from just one church in York on Sunday 13th December.

Lord Alf Dubs, who was himself a child refugee, said: “Congratulations on your petition and your campaign calling for an end to detention for child refugees.  I very much support what you are doing and wish you all possible success.”

Esme Madill of campaign group End Child Detention Now said: “It is the sad truth that each year around 1500 children are detained in the UK. This costly and unnecessary policy is extremely harmful to children. We want Prime Minister Gordon Brown to think about these detainees as children first, and to give them the same rights to be free from fear and distress as other children”.
 
Luljeta Nuzi said: “When you are waiting to hear for a decision about your claim for asylum it is hard enough even without being detained. Putting children in detention is damaging, they can’t understand why they needed to be locked up. We have had to explain to them that it is because they have asked for asylum and they become very upset”.

CONTACT ESME MADILL Mobile 0777 3350018

Notes to editors

The Shpresa Programme advances the education and training of the Albanian speaking people in the UK. www.shpresaprogramme.com

End Child Detention Now is a citizens’ initiative which sprang from a successful campaign to release a Barnsley born toddler and his parents from Yarl’s Wood Immigration Detention Centre where he had been held for more than three weeks in July 2009.
 
The UK Border Agency arrests and detains between 1000 and 2000 asylum-seeking children every year, although there is no evidence that families with young children abscond. Dave Wood, UKBA Director of Criminality and Detention, told a Parliamentary Committee in September 2009:  ‘Whilst issues are raised about absconding, that is not our biggest issue. It does happen but it is not terribly easy for a family unit to abscond.’
Source: Hansard  
 
Medical establishment’s protest – The Royal Colleges of Paediatrics and Child Health, General Practitioners and Psychiatrists and the Faculty of Public Health on Wednesday issued a joint statement condemning the Government’s detention policy and calling for it to end ‘without delay’.
 
The Lorek report – NHS paediatricians and psychologists, Lorek et al, reported in the international peer-reviewed journal, Child Abuse & Neglect, (October 2009) that children locked up at Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre were ‘clearly vulnerable, marginalized, and at risk of mental and physical harm as a result of state sanctioned neglect.’ The doctors recorded children’s ‘sexualised behaviour’, older children’s tendency to wet their beds and soil their pants, the ‘increased fear due to being suddenly placed in a facility resembling a prison’, the ‘abrupt loss of home, school, friends and all that was familiar to them.’
www.childrenssociety.org.uk/resources/documents/media/18565_full.pdf
 
Parliamentary Motion – 94 MPs have signed Chris Mullin MP’s parliamentary motion urging the Government to stop detaining children.