Petition for Avoiding Long-Term Detention and Permitting Provisional Release Flexibly

To Japanese citizens, activists for human rights, supporters of immigration detainees, and the Chief of East Japan Immigration Centre,

We are the detainees at East Japan Immigration Centre (EJIC) in Ushiku, Ibaraki Prefecture of Japan.

We are issued a deportation order as the result of examination by immigration officers because of falling under any one of the reasons for deportation that Immigration Control Act determines, like illegal stay (overstay), illegal entry, or violation of penal code.

Provisional Release, or Kari-homen, which we demand, is not a permission for residence, but to release an immigration detainee for humanitarian considerations. Provisional Release, stipulated in the Article 54 of Immigration Control Act, is a measure to release a detainee for some reasons like health problems, preparation for departure, etc., otherwise Immigration Bureau can indefinitely detain those issued a deportation order, according to its interpretation of the Article 54 (2) of Immigration Control Act. It is required that the one permitted Provisional Release obey not only Japanese laws but also the rules imposed as the requirements for Provisional Release.

We understand all these above, but we still petition to avoid long-term detention and to permit Provisional Release in a more flexible manner than currently done, for the following reasons.

1. We cannot return to homeland, and/or we need to remain in Japan.

The most of us are applicants for refugee status having fear of being persecuted in homeland. Our applications for asylum are never the attempts to resist deportation orders issued on the grounds of illegal stay or entry. We came to Japan in hope and expectation for finding protection of life or a way out of difficulty.

Some of us are, even though not asylum applicants, the residents in Japan for a very long time. We hope to remain in Japan because we want to live with our family, and never want to be separated from our respective children, wife or parents.

2. East Japan Immigration Centre is NOT designed for long-term detention.

EJIC has, besides the rooms for detainees, common facilities like a laundry room, communal showers, ping-pong tables, three payphones, a medical room to see a doctor or a nurse, and visiting rooms to see family members or friends. However, these facilities are not designed for long-term detention which causes the following problems.

• It often happens troubles or quarrels since people speaking different languages and having different religious or cultural backgrounds are crowded in a small room. We, the detainees at EJIC are shut up in respective rooms except only 5 hours 40 minutes in a day from 9:30 to 11:40 and from 13:00 to 16:30, and it is only 40 minutes that we can use an inner-court exercise space.
• We, detainees are supplied bread and milk or juice for breakfast, and a meal box (bento) for lunch and dinner. Food is cold except rice, vegetable soup and curry (Saturday dinner). Routine menu spoils appetite. We manage to eat meals just for subsistence.
• We, detainees have to buy a KDDI prepaid card to use a payphone, but it costs 1,000 JPY only for fifteen minutes of domestic call. It is too expensive.
• Besides five visiting rooms with transparent partition similar to those in prisons or police jails, EJIC has one special visiting room in which a detainee can see his or her children without partition but under video surveillance. However, one can use this room only 30 minutes during weekdays without holidays. This makes it difficult for us to see our respective family members because it is often difficult for them to come to visit us on weekdays.
• Problems concerning air conditioning and sanitation
  • Even though we can only breathe the air outside only for 40 minutes a day in an inner-court exercise space, we, detainees at EJIC suffer from deteriorated air quality caused by dirty air conditioning facilities including air conditioners, fans, and windows etc. EJIC has only one air conditioner per one detention bloc, not one in each room. This makes it impossible to adjust air conditioning of each room respectively, and causes deterioration of air. Officers leave air conditioning facilities dirty for a long time. Because of bad air quality and permeability, many of us suffers from respiratory diseases. The air inside EJIC is harmful for those not having healthy respiratory organs.
  • EJIC cleans just a few parts of common facilities like communal showers only five or ten minutes in a week, even though we use them 5 hours and 40 minutes every day. This affects our health directly and negatively.
• Medical problems
  • EJIC does not readily offers us medical care. In order to see a doctor, we have to submit an application form named “Detainee’s Request” (Hi-shuyosha Moshide-sho). However, at EJIC a doctor stands by for just a short period on weekday (for example, a dentist is ready only in the afternoon of Wednesdays). Therefore, it takes too long before an applicant sees a doctor, usually one month, or even two or three months in the case of seeing a dentist. As a result, it is only one or two out of some 25 detainees in one detention bloc, or only 30 at most out of nearly 350 detainees at EJIC, who can get a medical examination in a month. Moreover, the doctors hired by EJIC never see patients carefully. They close an examination only in one to three minutes, without observing a diseased part. We think such treatments like just explained above as medical neglects, and EJIC cannot justify them on the pretext that it has to deal with many applications.
  • We are prevented from seeing a doctor for more than one month. This means that, BEFORE the doctors see a patient, they judges it needless to examine him or her, or that they even reject to see how impending the patient’s symptom is. Moreover, the doctors examine us in a too careless and inadequate manner. In the most cases, they only prescribes makeshift medicines like painkillers or sleeping pills.
  • EJIC sometimes allows us to see an expert doctor outside. However, we are forced to wait for about one more month after it decided to take a patient to a doctor outside. When a patient is taken to the doctor, he or she is forced to endure a humiliating experience to walk in the hospital with handcuffs and rope around waists. Moreover, immigration officers who attend a patient interferes medical examination by giving an explanation to a doctor before seeing the patient, and discuss treatment after the exam without the patient. The doctor’s judgement is thus distorted as same as a judgement given by a doctor hired by EJIC. After the examination by a doctor outside, EJIC hardly accepts the next application by the same person. EJIC thus threatens and harms our health. Lack of sufficient budget or staffs cannot justify it. Japanese government is responsible for medical problems of immigration detainees.
• Stress and depression caused by long-term detention
  • EJIC shuts up people speaking different languages and having different religious or cultural backgrounds in a small room indefinitely for months or years, and put us under 24-hour surveillance and control every single day. Immigration detainees’ surroundings are even inferior to those in a prison. We are anxious every day about being deported, and about family. None of us knows when we will be released. We thus suffer from depression and health deterioration caused by stress of life under immigration detention which grows heavier and heavier. Therefore, it is natural that some of us fall into mental disorder, resort to hunger strike, or even commit suicide.
  • However, the reaction of EJIC is always to take passive and oppressive measures. It never attempts any improvement of food, common facilities (like extending the period to use exercise space), or medical care. Instead, when one disobeys officers or goes on hunger strike to make an objection to long-term detention, EJIC sends him or her to a room in another detention bloc, or even to a so-called special or punishment room [a room for temporal confinement of a detainee to be separated from others, according to Immigration Bureau]. In order to prevent suicide, EJIC removed any hook-like parts to hang something in communal shower room, and removed a door of each shower stall to transparent curtain, but it is never due to their location that suicides occur inside EJIC [an asylum applicant from India hanged himself in a shower stall in April 2018, and another detainee attempted to do the same thing in May].
  • When we demand the explanation of what are the factors of a positive or negative result of application for Provisional Release, the officers at EJIC reject our demand, and try to persuade us to return to homeland. Even though EJIC sometimes admits a request for psychiatric consultation, the counsellor hired by EJIC always assumes that the problem is due to misunderstanding of a patient about the rules of immigration detention. So the counsellor’s advices are useless to solve the problem, but just the defenses of EJIC to help it with making us return to homeland. In short, the counsellors hired by Immigration Bureau are a disguise to hide the reality of immigration detention, just like its doctors and nurses are so. It is just a rhetoric or a disguise too that it is written in the Ordinance for Treatment of Immigration Detainees (Article 2 etc.) that, unless it conflicts security needs, the Chief of an Immigration Detention Center or a Regional Immigration Bureau ought to pay attention to manner or life style related to each detainee’s origin, and to secure human rights of detainees in sleeping, food, clothing and daily necessities, health and sanitary conditions, access to medical care, accepting visits, etc.
  • EJIC needs to improve its facilities and manner initiatively, and in an open and obvious way. If it had really done so, the tragic cases at EJIC in the past would have never happened, such like a death of a Vietnamese man in March 2017 caused by medical neglect, and a suicide of a man from India in April 2014.
• [An opinion of the detainees in 2A bloc, added on 2018/11/24] In order to fulfill Article 61 (7) of Japanese Immigration Act concerning the way to treat of detainees, it should be allowed that we receive foods which are currently prohibited like food cans or dried fruits, or that we use our own mobile phones. We are not permitted to do so.

3. Detention is the means to compel detainees to leave Japan at their own expense, but it goes beyond the original purpose of detention.

We estimate that, according to its legal purpose, immigration detention is only permitted for a short period from a deportation order is issued until it is enforced.

However, we have been detained for a very long time at EJIC after a long detention at a Regional Immigration Bureau in Tokyo, Nagoya, etc. Long-term detention is therefore not a problem particular to EJIC but to the entire system of immigration detention in Japan. The actual and fundamental purpose of immigration detention in Japan has been to compel us to leave Japan at their own expense, namely, to confine us in a cruel and harsh place, to deprive of our liberties, and to torture us mentally and physically, so that we give up and consent to leave Japan. This purpose explains why EJIC pointlessly prolong the period of detention by not permitting Provisional Release which is to be permitted for those whose deportation is unable to be enforced, like asylum applicants, those filing a lawsuit to repeal deportation order, etc. Even though we are detained for one, two, or more than three years, we are not permitted Provisional Release no matter how many times we apply for it [some of them are detained more than five years].

4. Long-term detention brings no positive results, but can rather have a negative impact on Japan.

It is true that our stay is not legal under the immigration law of Japan, but it is not fair to call us criminals because of that. By the way, what is the purpose of long-term detention? To secure Japanese society by not releasing us out even temporarily, or just to compel formal rules in a bureaucratic or conformist manner? To maintain national interests, namely, security, good manners, public health, labor market etc., or just to treat us in a discriminatory manner by neglecting our personal freedoms? In order to answer these questions, you need to see the situation of foreign residents in Japan from various viewpoints.

There is no correlation between the number of those permitted Provisional Release and the number of illegal residents or the number of crimes committed by foreigners. It is certain that the number of those permitted Provisional Release is decreasing because of long-term detention, but this never means the decrease in the number of crimes by foreigners or illegal residents. Long-term detention is never a solution to illegal stay or crimes by foreigners. It is discussed in the national diet whether to admit more foreigners as workers from the next year. However, if the government changes the system but never changes the way of treating foreigners with no protection of their rights as workers, it is easy to predict that new comers escape from their workplaces and become “illegal” residents too. Thus, you will have new “illegal” residents after you drive out old illegal residents. In this way, the problem seems to be unsolvable.

Moreover, long-term detention is, if it cannot change our will to stay, just an abuse of us and our family, and even an incitement of discrimination and hostility against foreigners among Japanese people. To deport us against our will is not a solution either. Do you think it is possible that one can start a new life under the threat of persecution, being separated from family, or with unhealable health and mental problems caused by long-term detention?

All the reasons for long-term detention that we quoted above are just unacceptable pretexts. Long-term detention is nothing but human right abuse. It neglects the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the Refugee Convention of 1951, and contradicts to Article 98 (2) of the Constitution of Japan which stipulates that the treaties concluded by Japan and established laws of nations shall be faithfully observed.

This Petition is signed by us, the detainees of EJIC, and the Japanese citizens supporting our fight for freedom. Japan as we know is a nation respecting freedom as a common value of mankind, and a model for other nations. We submit this Petition for Avoiding Long-Term Detention and Permitting Provisional Release Flexibly with deep gratitude and respect for Japanese citizens.

October 30, 2018

Those who signed the Petition for Avoiding Long-Term Detention and Permitting Provisional Release Flexibly