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In a damning indictment of the UK’s immigration detention system, a High Court judge has ruled that the Home Office has persistently and unlawfully failed to protect vulnerable migrants from inhuman and degrading treatment, a breach of their rights under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), Daily Dazzling Dawn confirmed.
Mrs Justice Jefford’s judgment, handed down today, found a systemic and "persistent picture of a failure" in the systems designed to safeguard detainees, specifically citing the inadequate operation of the crucial Rule 35 procedure. This safeguard requires medical practitioners in detention centres to issue urgent reports to the Home Office when a detainee's health, particularly mental health or suicide risk, makes continued detention unsuitable.
The ruling stems from a landmark legal challenge brought by two former detainees, identified only as 'AH' and 'IS', who were held at the notorious Brook House Immigration Removal Centre near Gatwick between July 2023 and March 2024. The case explicitly highlights a migrant from Bangladesh and another from Egypt whose worsening mental illnesses and signs of serious self-harm, including periods of constant suicide watch under the separate Assessment Care in Detention and Teamwork (ACDT) process, were dangerously overlooked.
The court found that despite both men being on suicide watch, neither received the mandatory Rule 35 report assessing their suitability for continued detention. The judge noted a "disconnect" between the high number of detainees managed under the suicide-watch protocol and the strikingly low number of Rule 35 reports being generated, particularly those related to suicide risk. This widespread systemic failure, the court determined, has been ongoing for years, dating back at least to the period covered by the 2017 BBC Panorama exposé and the subsequent Brook House Public Inquiry, whose own 2023 recommendations the Home Office is still struggling to fully implement.
A Repeated Failure to Protect-The consequences of this failure are profound, potentially affecting thousands of individuals deemed "Adults at Risk" who are held in detention centres across the UK.
Lewis Kett of Duncan Lewis Solicitors, representing the two claimants, welcomed the judgment, stating that his clients’ experiences were "emblematic of a sustained failure by the Home Secretary over a number of years to properly run systems that safeguard vulnerable people." He added that this negligence has placed "countless immigration detainees with serious mental illness or suicidality at a real risk of harm." Crucially, one of the claimants, 'IS', a migrant from Bangladesh, had reportedly been before the High Court in 2019 raising similar concerns about detention safeguards, underscoring the Home Office's long-standing failure to enact meaningful reform.
Charities and human rights groups are intensifying their calls for the paper-based protections to be genuinely enforced. Emma Ginn, the director of Medical Justice, confirmed that her organisation continues to witness a "comprehensive failure" to complete the vital reports, citing recent asylum seeker clients who were detained for the UK-France returns scheme and included an individual who had attempted suicide in detention but did not have the appropriate Rule 35 report completed.
In response, a Home Office spokesperson stated: “We are committed to ensuring that detention and removal are carried out with dignity and respect and have made progress in improving detention safeguards.” They claimed that out of the 30 recommendations made by the Brook House Inquiry in September 2023, 25 have been met and closed, with improvements continuing to be embedded. However, the High Court’s definitive finding of an ongoing, unlawful system failure starkly contrasts with the department's assurances of progress.
This judicial scrutiny places immense pressure on the Home Office to immediately overhaul its detention procedures, ensuring that the Rule 35 safeguard functions as a genuine safety net for vulnerable detainees, rather than a system repeatedly and unlawfully breached. The ruling represents a significant victory for migrant rights and the rule of law, confirming that the state has an unavoidable obligation to protect the fundamental human rights of those it chooses to detain.
