OAID Manifesto

The indefinite imprisonment of  migrants for ‘administrative reasons’ is wrong. Yet this happens routinely in the UK. Here, as elsewhere, there are raids every week on people’s homes and their places of work to bring them in prison vans to detention centres (called ‘Immigration Removal Centres’ by the Home Office), prior to marching them onto deportation flights to countries the Home Office deem to be their place of origin.

Oxford Against Immigration Detention (OAID) finds this practice cruel, inhumane, not lawful. It flies in the face of human rights, and creates quite unnecessary mental anguish, hardship and suffering.

Many of the people ‘detained’ in these ‘IRC’s have already had their share of suffering in the countries they fled: persecution, climate disaster, wars.

Further, in more than 50% of cases, the Home Office is found to have wrongly imprisoned migrants.

OAID is pleased that the Home Office have reduced the number of places where it locks people up in this way. Campsfield House, near Kidlington, is the latest Centre to be permanently closed.

OAID will continue to campaign until all immigration detention centres are closed, and no migrant is detained for ‘administrative reasons’.

OAID will do this by exposing the actions of the Home Office by leaflets, publications, holding stalls and events, carrying out research and writing reports. OAID has exposed the practice of Bail Hearings for detainees through a series of publications and ongoing research which can be found on the bailobs.org website.

OAID will support other campaigns against detention of immigrants, including End Heathrow Immigration Detention, and will work with groups such as Amnesty and City of Sanctuary that share the same or similar aims.

OAID will continue to make the links between the ‘hostile environment’, the UK’s punitive immigration system, the place of immigration detention in this system,  climate change, wars, the arms trade, economic plunder by the richer nations of the world and the huge global companies,  and political persecution

OAID will strive to make migrants themselves central actors in the campaigning.