Ugandan women on hunger strike in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire are being denied access to legal and welfare support, including rape crisis services. According to Legal Action for Women, the women have also suffered harassment from male guards at the centre, who have entered women’s rooms late at night without knocking, searched their personal belongings and shined torches in detainees’ eyes while they are sleeping, in the name of suicide watch. The women launched their hunger strike on July 7 to protest their forced removal, demand their asylum claims be reconsidered and to protest their conditions in detention. A number of the women are HIV-positive and due to be deported shortly, despite the lack of treatment available to them on return. Send messages of support to <law@crossroadswomen.net>.

From Green Left Weekly, August 17, 2005.
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