In The Press

Lewis Kett, Public Law and Immigration solicitor at Duncan Lewis, speaks on RT about the recent High Court ruling stating that the Home Office’s previous definition of torture was unlawful, since it limited vulnerable people to only those who had received torture by state actors. One claimant, a Vietnamese woman, had been beaten, cut and burnt by loan sharks who her parent’s owed money to. After escaping that torture and claiming asylum in the UK, she was detained because the abuse she had received did not meet the definition of torture since it was inflicted by non-state officials. In the wake of this ruling stating that the Home Office’s previous definition was unlawful, Lewis anticipates that many detainees released due to the change in the definition will have grounds to claim damages for wrongful detention. Lewis states: “…the reason this [Adult’s at Risk] policy came into place in the first place was following a review by a senior civil servant Stephen Shaw and the whole idea following his review was that …a wider range of vulnerable detainees …should not be in detention centres and the idea of the Adults at Risk policy was to have a much more wide ranging policy in which those people can be adequately identified and if suitable be released, however, it looks like…the Home Office attempted to restrict one of the key vulnerability mechanisms which [identified] victims of torture so that only state actor [torture victims] could be treated as vulnerable – [which] essentially reduced the numbers by hundreds in terms of who could be qualified as eligible for release.” Following the successful challenge to this definition of torture, Lewis states that the Home Office will need to properly revise the Adults at Risk policy to identify all vulnerable persons in detention.