Government excluding adults at risk

Home Office guidance on ‘adults at risk’ unlawfully excludes victims of torture at the hands of non-state actors, the High Court has held.

Ruling in Medical Justice v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2017] EWHC 2461 (Admin), Mr Justice Ouseley held that the statutory guidance ‘Adults at risk in immigration detention’ used an unlawfully restrictive definition of ‘torture’. Consequently, the guidance saved victims of state-sponsored torture from being held in immigration detention but failed to protect victims of torture by traffickers, terrorists and other groups.

Ouseley J held the narrowing of the definition of torture lacked ’rational or evidence base’. He said the definition used in the guidance ‘would require medical practitioners to reach conclusions on political issues which they cannot rationally be asked to reach’.

Jed Pennington, solicitor at Bhatt Murphy, who acted for Medical Justice and two of the detainees, said: ‘It is shameful that the Home Office reintroduced a definition of torture that the High Court had already thrown out under the guise of a policy that is supposed to be more protective of vulnerable detainees. Adults at risk is fundamentally flawed and should be replaced with a framework that genuinely protects the vulnerable with, as a minimum, a prohibition on the detention of all victims of torture or trauma.’

The seven detainees who, along with the charity Medical Justice, challenged the guidance included two women who suffered sexual violence, rape and human trafficking for sexual exploitation.

Martha Spurrier, director of Liberty, said: ‘It is a damning indictment of our government that this sickening policy ever saw the light of day. In the UK, in 2017, the Home Secretary ignored medical expertise, basic humanity and the law to sign off a barbaric policy to lock up traumatised torture survivors.’

The ruling means hundreds of people may have been unlawfully detained—Medical Justice says it receives more than 1,000 referrals from among about 30,000 people held each year in immigration detention.