Stephanie Harrison KC and Emma Fitzsimons of Garden Court Chambers are on the legal team, alongside Alex Goodman KC of Landmark Chambers & Grace Capel of Doughty Street Chambers.
Counsel are instructed by solicitors Lewis Kett, Nicholas Hughes & caseworkers Dominic Chambers, Florence Davies, Caspar Kwint & David Garrick, of Duncan Lewis.
The below content has been reproduced from a Duncan Lewis press release.
Counsel are representing three claimants in a judicial review challenge against the Government’s failure to act on the evidence and findings of the Brook House Public Inquiry.
The inquiry exposed serious mistreatment and abuse of immigration detainees at Brook House Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) and made various recommendations to rectify dangerous practices they identified.
The High Court has ordered an expedited rolled-up hearing of the claims (D1914 + AAA v SSHD and AVY v SSHD), which will take place from 17 to 19 June 2025, before Mr Justice Sheldon.
Background: Systemic Abuse at Brook House IRC
The challenge relates to the aftermath of the reporting of the Brook House Statutory Public Inquiry in September 2023. That inquiry was established in November 2019 to investigate credible evidence of serious mistreatment and abuse of immigration detainees in breach of Article 3 ECHR by detention officers and medical staff at Brook House IRC in 2017. Undercover reporting by BBC Panorama exposed this. The Inquiry was established following a successful judicial review brought by the legal team (MA & BB v SSHD [2019] EWHC 1523).
In that case, the High Court ruled that the then Home Secretary breached the Article 3 ECHR investigative duty by failing to conduct a thorough investigation into events at Brook House. The court found that this failure prevented the full facts from coming to light, which in turn hindered necessary reforms and lessons being learned to prevent future mistreatment and abuse in immigration removal centres (IRCs).
The Inquiry’s report was published on 19 September 2023. The legal team represented several of the victims who were Core Participants. The Chair found credible evidence of 19 incidents of mistreatment of detainees in breach of Article 3 ECHR, including repeated physical assaults and threats of violence, widespread derogatory verbal abuse, unlawful and excessive use of force and segregation, systemic failures in the detention safeguards to protect vulnerable people, and a toxic institutional culture marked by dehumanisation and racism.
The Chair made 33 detailed recommendations to the Home Secretary, including a 28-day time limit on the use of the administrative power to detain, in order to rectify the issues that caused or contributed to the Article 3 mistreatment, and so that lessons could be learned to prevent repeated mistreatment.
The judicial review claim is brought by three Claimants who are all former immigration detainees who claim they were subject to mistreatment in detention. They argue that the Home Office is still in breach of the Article 3 investigative duty because it has failed to act upon many of the recommendations and to rectify the problems identified by the Inquiry.
The Claimants argue that not only have the Inquiry’s findings and recommendations been insufficiently acted upon to date, but that the previous and current governments have actively taken steps that weaken the detention safeguards in statute and policy, and put greater numbers of vulnerable people at risk of harm into detention.
The Claimants include D1914, an individual shown in the Panorama documentary and who the Inquiry found evidence of Article 3 mistreatment, plus two individuals subsequently detained in 2024 who argue they could have avoided the mistreatment they suffered in detention had the Inquiry’s findings and recommendations been accepted and effectively acted upon.
The Claimants rely upon further devastating findings by His Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons (‘HMIP’) at Harmondsworth IRC, published in July 2024, which described “the worst” conditions inspectors had ever seen in UK immigration detention and “a level of chaos…that was truly shocking”. In November 2024, the HMIP also reported multiple serious on-going concerns at Brook House IRC itself, including a substantial rise in self-harm and violence since the last inspection, a decline in safety and respect, poorer healthcare provision, and failing safeguards. In this context, the Home Secretary’s refusal to take up the offer, by the Inquiry Chair Kate Eves, to undertake, at no cost to the public, a follow-up review is difficult to understand.
