Current Projects
Unaccompanied refugee children – The UK government operates a deeply problematic policy of determining the age of unaccompanied minors within hours of their arrival by small boat. This decision is made during a short interview by immigration officers, and often involves racial prejudice. Children often arrive without identity documents, but even when in possession of proof of age, they are frequently prohibited from showing this. As a result of this practice, at least 1300 children have been wrongly treated as adults and placed in adult settings such as Home Office hotels and highly populated camps. They are now at risk of harm as a direct result of these policies.
Due to our extensive outreach work we have carried out, these children often contact us directly requesting help. When contacting us these children often tell us they are afraid, distressed and justifiably confused as to why they have been placed in accommodations with adults.
HfRN has worked with over 700 children wrongly placed in adult settings, that we have since assisted into child protective settings.We have worked with these children to gather evidence of the harm caused to them and identified the practices that are resulting in this harm. We have strategised with lawyers and developed an emerging legal strategy to achieve our aim of ending the Home Offices’ practice of placing children at risk of harm and denying them their rights.
More information can be here.
Criminalisation of unaccompanied refugee children – Since October 2022, HfRN has worked with 15 children, charged with immigration offences under the Nationality and Borders Act, that are incarcerated in adult prisons. We assist these children to be able to access legal advice, and ensure their release from prison, into child protective environments. To date, five of these children have had their ages accepted and are now in child protective environments. However this has taken place after they have all spent long periods of time incarcerated in adult prisons. We are working with these children to help them recover and continue to access their rights. Organisationally, we are learning from their experiences and using litigation to challenge this practice.
More information can be found here.
Hotels - Accommodation – At the start of the Covid 19 pandemic, the Home Office began using hundreds of hotels and a number of disused army bases run by private companies to accommodate asylum seekers. It used the pandemic to generate profit for its contractors, claiming that the extreme cost of these accommodations is because thousands of people are coming to the UK seeking asylum, however asylum claims remain unprocessed, often for years, leaving asylum seekers in limbo, unable to work and living sometimes for years in such hotels.
These sites are run by private companies and are often heavily controlled, with recorded abuses taking place daily. We have documented sexual exploitation by staff, denial of medical care, restrictions on freedom of movement, malnutrition amongst children, violence and racism and harassment by staff.
These environments cause significant harm to those who are forced to live there. Many have experienced torture in their country of origin or during their journey to Europe, so sites such as these quasi-detention camps, with barbed wire fences and security guards, cause acute mental distress and trauma.
For others, including children, prolonged periods in hotels again run by security guards, are also traumatic due to dangerous journeys to the UK where violence by guards is commonplace. Children are spending many months, often years in hotels, which impacts their development and education.
In the most serious of cases, we have worked with survivors of torture who are severely physically and mentally unwell, sometimes as a direct result of the treatment they have endured in the UK asylum system. Individuals are left unable to care for themselves due to significant disabilities and those with severe health conditions deteriorate as healthcare is blocked by accommodation staff.
We have assisted over 300 people to be removed from settings including Napier barracks and Wethersfield, two disused army barracks. We have informed and provided evidence to litigation and conducted parliamentary advocacy on the issue. We campaign for an end to profit making and abuse and a move to community-based accommodation for all those seeking asylum, away from controlled settings such as camps and hotels.
More information can be found here.
Widespread abuse - In addition to our focused projects, we generally support those suffering from a range of grave human rights abuses within the UK asylum & protection system such as denial of medical care, access to legal advice, experience of abuse and harm by the Home Office staff and contractors, death and serious illness or harm, police violence and the wider impact of Home Office Immigration policies. Our aim is to work with those individuals affected, to expose harm and examine ways of achieving individual and collective access to justice to challenge systemic policies.
Cross Border – Unfortunately, there are virtually no safe routes for the majority of asylum seekers.. As a result, many thousands of people have spent time subjected to horrendous treatment at our shared border with France and Belgium. We work with a group of organisations who assist unaccompanied asylum-seeking children stuck at this border. We have partnerships with organisations in France and Belgium to share best practice and improve the information that accurately reflects the contexts in which we are working. We attempt to strategise positive outcomes for these children through these strategic efforts. We are a point of contact for acute and unusual cases, such as family separation across borders and children known to NGOs in France that are now in the UK (where evidence of their age can be obtained from French child protective services). We also act as a point of contact for French and Belgian NGOs where a child is missing.