Nothing suspicious about Asylum seeker hanged

international | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Tuesday July 20, 2004 12:08 by Eoin Dubsky

An article in today's Guardian newspaper about a riot at the UK's worst immigration removal centre, the Harmondsworth conplex, begins with a passage which might tell us something about why people there are rioting: "The Home Office today promised a full investigation after the discovery of a hanged detainee led to a "serious disturbance" overnight at the country's largest immigration detention centre. The death was not thought to be suspicious, but staff at the Harmondsworth complex - near Heathrow airport, west London - were forced to withdraw for their own safety."

A guy gets hanged, and there's nothing suspicious about it, not even just a little bit suspicious?

As the Guardian article explains, Harmondsworth has been heavily criticised by the Government's chief inspector of prisons, Anne Owers, for "failing to provide a safe and stable environment". It's an "immigration removal centre", so if they don't get out of there somehow they'll soon be on a plane back to their country when all the paperwork is ready.

Harmondsworth is run by UK Detention Services Ltd., a British subsidiary of French multinational Sodexho. Sodexho do some catering business here in Ireland, but they're also heavily invested in the growing for-profit prison industry in the UK and America.

According to Kevin Pranis, a Soros Justice Fellow and Prison Moratorium Project activist in the States, the French-based Sodexho group, which owns Sodexho Marriott Services (US), is the largest investor in US private prisons through its 11% holdings in Prison Realty Trust/Corrections Corporation of America. (http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/125/sodexho.shtml)