Letter to Charles Clarke

Rt. Hon. Charles Clarke

Rt. Hon. Hazel Blears
Home Office
50 Queen Anne’s Gate
London SW1H 9AT

RE: Deportation Arrests, 11 August 2005

France, 15 august 2005

Dear Mrs Blears and Mr. Clarke,

I am a concerned member of the European public writing regarding the case of the aforementioned detainees in Long Lartin and Full Sutton prisons, whose deportation to Algeria is claimed to be safe by your office due to a prior agreement with this country’s authorities.
Firstly, there is a genuine fear that these men will be abused by Algerian authorities who notoriously ill treat their nationals, including threats to their family, beatings and other means of torture like the rag, the falaka and sodomy. These concerns are supported by all Human Rights NGO, even Mr Manfred Novak himself, in the name of UNO, affirmed that such an agreement would not have any value.
Secondly, as a French national, I would like to turn your attention to the fact that although your Prime Minister declared that France has, for a long time, processed deportations, your current procedure is equivalent to ours. Indeed, the resemblance stops with the possibility given to the person concerned to appeal, not towards an administrative commission but towards the Administrative Court, the line of public law of our judicial power. For the remainder, the French authorities never imprisoned the people to whom were notified their « decree of deportation ». Those are under control order or, in the worst case, entrusted to a center of administrative retention when this notification is given to them when the prison sentence that they served ends. The French authorities never removed a person who was receiving essential medical care in a hospital complex; apart, it should be well acknowledged, in the darkest hours of the government of Vichy.

Thus, whereas France is no longer a land of welcome and defender of the human rights statute, you are giving up the respect of all the Western citizens by disavowing overnight what made your Great Nation the champion of habeas corpus and equity.

Yours sincerely
Karyn AGOSTINI-LIPPI
France