A/HRC/41/54/Add.4
is clear that all force used by the police – including restraint - must be necessary,
proportionate and reasonable in the circumstances.
52.
Information previously released by the Home Office in response to a Freedom of
Information request, there have been 23 deaths, in Immigration Removal Centres (IRC) or
whilst under escort, between 1991 and 2014. Only one of those deaths was found to have
been due to the use of restraint by Detainee Custody Officers.
53.
As part of the UK Government’s commitment to increase transparency around
immigration detention, we are reviewing the publication of immigration detention data. This
includes data relating to deaths in immigration detention. This data was published for the first
time in the Government’s November 2018 online statistics release and, moving forward, will
be published annually.
54.
Deaths in immigration detention are a relatively rare occurrence and form only a very
small proportion of the detention estate throughput, which is around 24,000 people detained
per year solely under immigration powers. All deaths in immigration detention are
independently investigated. Every death in immigration detention is subject to investigation
(where appropriate) by the police, the coroner (or Procurator Fiscal in Scotland) and the
independent Prisons and Probation Ombudsman (PPO). Any recommendations made as a
result of these investigations are thoroughly examined to see how they can be used to help
prevent further deaths. Fatal incident investigation reports are published on the PPO website.
55.
Para 43: The reference to “2011 report by the Independent Office for Police Conduct
(IOPC) on deaths in custody is incorrect. The report was by the Independent Police
Complaints Commission (IPCC), which was reformed and renamed as the IOPC in January
2018.
E.
Racial Impact of Counterterrorism and Counter extremism Law and
Policy
Prevent Strategy
56.
Para 47-51: The Government rejects much of the characterisation portrayed in Section
C of the report, particularly that in response to recent terrorist attacks ‘leading politicians’
have portrayed Muslims as ‘inherently dangerous, inherently opposed to Britain’s prosperity,
and inherently foreign’. The report cites no evidence for this. It is also particularly
disappointing that the report states misinterpretations about the Prevent Strategy, which it
inaccurately seeks to represent as having been directly drawn from Government publications.
The report states in a number of instances that Prevent ‘disproportionately’ targets Muslims
without providing any evidence of disproportionality, and without making any examination
of the nature of the terrorist threat to the UK which the Prevent Strategy seeks to counter.
Indeed, the report makes no mention that the Prevent Strategy addresses all forms of
terrorism, including right wing terrorism, or that figures from 2017/18 show that those
receiving support from the Channel programme (part of Prevent, which provides voluntary,
confidential support to those who are vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism) were just as
likely to be inspired by right wing extremism as Islamist extremism.
57.
Referral figures into Prevent also demonstrate that the report’s characterisation that
Prevent has ‘transformed public institutions such as hospitals, schools, universities, and even
police’ is extremely misleading: by way of example, despite the NHS dealing with over 1m
people every 36 hours, just 464 people were referred to Prevent by the health sector in the
year 2017/18. The report repeats myths that Prevent forces frontline workers to report people
and does not mention that the crucial fact that Prevent is a non-criminal, supportive
programme, and that the ‘life-altering judgments’ which it refers to exist to support
vulnerable people away from the influence of terrorist recruiters, and have an
overwhelmingly positive effect. The Government announced in January 2019 that it would
create an independent review of Prevent, which will report back to Parliament before August
2020.
58.
National Security is reserved to the UK Government. Whilst delivery of the Prevent
Strategy in Scotland shares the same strategic objectives as the rest of the UK, it also reflects
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