Amicus members staged a one day strike at Oakington Detention Centre near Cambridge on Tuesday 22nd August.

Amicus members, employed by the Refugee Legal Centre (RLC’s) to provide legal representation to asylum seekers detained at Oakington will be striking in protest at the RLC’s failure to abide by its Redundancy Policy.



95% of Amicus’ members at Oakington voted in favour of industrial action in a ballot conducted earlier this month after fourteen early redundancies were made in July without consultation with the union. Employees are also being redeployed from the site and up to twenty more face losing their jobs at the end of September.

Respect are concerned at the way staff have been treated and at the disregard for their rights as employees.

Amicus Regional Officer, Sarah Carpenter, said:

“There’s a real hypocrisy at work here. This is a human rights organisation that is abandoning agreed policies and sacrificing people when it suits them which is exactly what our members at Oakington seek to defend their clients from.”

Cambridge Respest have repeatedly stated concerns over the treatment of asylum seekers and the role of the centre. It is clear that conditions for both detainees and staff is worsening.

In June the Home Office decided to convert Oakington from a centre for fast tracking asylum claims into an ordinary detention centre. On Wednesday this week the Legal Services Commission decided that the contract for providing a legal service to those six asylum seekers per day after the end of September would be awarded to the Immigration Advisory Service, the other organisation on site at Oakington which provides a legal service to detained asylum seekers.

A picket was in place on Tuesday between 8.30 am and 10.30 am.

Amicus says the plans for Oakington fly in the face of the Home Offices immigration policy. The sites future as a detention centre is also uncertain but is likely to stay open until 2008 and perhaps up until 2011. Oakington Detention Centre was opened in 2000 in order to process asylum claims within a week.

The RLC, which is a national organisation, has a record of challenging Home Office decisions on Immigration. Last year the RLC won the Liberty award for defending Human Rights which is awarded by Liberty, Amnesty and the Law Society.

Labels: Oakington/Immigration