UK Asylum Seeker Hunger Strike Enters Day 6

Over 100 asylum seekers have gone almost a week without food to protest conditions described by a recent parliamentary inquiry as “unjust.”

Asylum seekers being held in U.K. detention centers entered their sixth day of protest Saturday, demanding better conditions and faster processing.
“Everybody is suffering here because of (the) unreasonable time of detention – because nobody knows when they are releasing us,” one asylum seeker stated on the blog, detainedvoices.
Over 100 asylum seekers at the Harmondsworth Detention Center have been on a hunger strike since Sunday morning. When the protest started, local media carried footage of asylum seekers protesting in the center’s exercise yard.
Since then, similar protests have broken out in at least five other U.K. detention centers.
Another Western country, Australia, is also facing widespread protests in its own detention centers.
On social media, asylum seekers have said security personnel have begun searching rooms for cameras and phones “so guys can’t send any videos outside.”

“They say, ‘We don’t like the way you have started a hunger strike and that (the) media are seeing (it),’” they said.
The hunger strike began a week after a parliamentary inquiry called for a 28 day detention limit and better conditions for asylum seekers. It also recommended authorities stop detaining pregnant women and vulnerable asylum seekers such as torture victims and the elderly. The U.K. is the only member country of the European Union that doesn’t have a maximum period for detaining asylum seekers.
Describing the detention system as “expensive, ineffective and unjust,” the report found some asylum seekers were kept behind bars for as long as four years, and without being given any time-frame for possible release.
The inquiry concluded the system puts the health of detainees at “serious risk.”