Colin Firth: Payout for child asylum seekers held in detention (The Telegraph)

A family of asylum seekers has won a six-figure payout from the Home Office after being detained for more than a year when they were children.

The Ay family were put on a Channel Express flight from Stansted to Frankfurt Photo: PA

By Tom Whitehead, Home Affairs Editor

6:00AM GMT 07 Jan 2012

The Ay family, Kurdish refugees from Turkey, was detained for 13 months in 2002 as the Government attempted to return them to Germany, where they had first made a claim for asylum.

Among those detained at Dungavel immigration removal centre in Scotland were four children aged between seven and 13.

The case gained celebrity attention when Colin Firth, the actor, and JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, spoke out against the detention of children. Firth described the practice as “shameful cruelty” in a letter to a newspaper in May 2009.

The family was also the inspiration for Broken English, a play aired on BBC Radio 4 in 2006.

Since taking power, the Coalition Government has pledged to end the detention of child asylum seekers.

Lawyers for the Ay family, who are now in Germany, took civil action against the Home Office for unlawful detention.

The case was settled out of court with a six-figure compensation for the children, three of whom are now adults. The exact amount cannot be disclosed for legal reasons.

The family was fearful that if returned to Germany they would be sent on to Turkey, where their parents had been persecuted. They also claimed that they had been detained unlawfully, and for too long.

Donna Covey, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, said: “We will continue to campaign for child detention to end once and for all until no other children are locked up by what is supposed to be a civilised state.”

A UK Border Agency spokesman said: “In March 2011, we established a new family returns process that ended the detention of children.

“This ensures that families with no right to be in the UK are given every opportunity to leave without the need for further action and are offered assistance at every stage.

“As a last resort, where all voluntary options have failed, families may be held in our pre-departure accommodation at Cedars, which is run in partnership with Barnardo’s.”

Child asylum seekers are no longer detained for long periods, but can still be held for up to a week.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8999089/Payout-for-child-asylum-seekers-held-in-detention.html

At British hearing, stars turn tables on tabloids

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press

Associated PressNovember 20, 2011 12:28 AMCopyright Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

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(11-20) 00:28 PST LONDON, United Kingdom (AP) --

They've been hacked and libeled, stalked and slandered. Now the public figures whose personal lives have long offered grist for Britain's news mill have been given a rare chance to confront their tabloid tormors.

Film star Hugh Grant, "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling, and the father of missing girl Madeleine McCann are among those due to testify over the next week at the U.K. inquiry into media ethics — a judicial body that could recommend sweeping changes to the way Britons get their news.
The nationally televised inquiry would give many of those in the public eye an unprecedented chance to challenge those who write about them, said Cary Cooper, a professor at northern England's Lancaster University and the author of "Public Faces, Private Lives."

"This is the first time the celebrities have been able to strike back," Cooper said. "I think it will have an impact, and the media might — for a while at least — pull away."

Speaking ahead of the testimony, victims' lawyer David Sherborne told the inquiry multiple tales of shattered privacy, broken lives and even suicides stemming from relentless media intrusion.
"When people talk of public interest in exposing the private lives of well-known people or those close to them, this is the real, brutally real impact which this kind of journalism has," Sherborne said.
Britain's media ethics probe was set up in the wake of the scandal over phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World, which was shut in July after it became clear that the tabloid had systematically broken the law. Most horrific was the news that the tabloid had broken into the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler in its search for scoops.

Cooper acknowledged that celebrities like Grant or actress Sienna Miller — another star due to give evidence — have struggled to get much in the way of public sympathy even when it was shown that their privacy had been invaded. But he said their appearance alongside crime victims such as Bob and Sally Dowler or Gerry McCann could mark a shift in attitudes.

"They're going to get hit worse by the Milly Dowler family and witnesses of that ilk," he said.
Sherborne, in a two-and-half-hour-long presentation Wednesday, promised to make journalists squirm.

Most powerful among his accusations was the suggestion that media coverage had driven some celebrities' family members to the brink of suicide — or beyond.

Sherborne said that former Formula One racing boss Max Mosley believed that the suicide of his 39-year-old son Alexander could also be at least in part attributed to "the very public humiliation" dealt to his father by the News of the World's expose of his sexual shenanigans.

He went on to outline the case of soccer player Garry Flitcroft, whose life was turned upside down by a newspaper's revelation that he'd cheated on his wife. Flitcroft's children were teased in school, his family was tracked by helicopter and his ailing father fell into a deepening depression before taking his own life, the lawyer said.

Another case involved Charlotte Church, the British singer who shot to stardom as a teenager. Sherborne said she'd been subjected to waves of harassment. Photographers chased her in cars, tried to take pictures up her skirt and cut holes in bushes to install secret cameras. So hungry was the press for scoops about her private life that journalists revealed she was pregnant before she had even told her parents.

Worse still was the News of the World's expose of her father's affair in 2005. Sherborne said that Church's mother had attempted suicide shortly before the story ran, but that rather than hold back, "the newspaper approached her mother directly and persuaded her to give them an exclusive, despite her fragile condition, as part of a Faustian pact that in return they would not run another lurid follow-up story about her husband's affair."

Others testifying over the next seven days include comic actor Steve Coogan, whose romantic exploits have been exhaustively documented, and broadcaster Anne Diamond, who was targeted by Murdoch's press after she challenged the mogul about his ethics.

Chris Jeffries, who was wrongly implicated in the murder of his tenant, is also due to give evidence, along with soccer star Paul Gascoigne's ex-wife Sheryl; human rights activist Jane Winter; former army intelligence officer Ian Hurst; and Margaret Watson, whose teenage daughter Diane was stabbed to death in 1991.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/11/20/international/i001543S09.DTL#ixzz1eGchvQ8k