In the last week of Parliament, before the Christmas recess, I held the last debate in Westminster Hall on the subject of allegations of abuse of failed asylum seekers during the deportation process.

I have always had a number of reservations against the deportation of failed asylum seekers. The Home Office is notorious for getting asylum decisions wrong. Pushing to remove high numbers of asylum seekers risks sending people back to places where they are in danger. This is clearly illustrated by the fact that failed asylum-seekers are returned to countries known to be unsafe, like Iraq, the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe.

The Foreign Office recommend that UK citizens do not travel to these countries. I have concerns over sending people back to their countries of origin when they have been in this country for many years and have settled their families here. And as Liz Fekete point out in her report The Deportation Machine, cows leaving the EU are better monitored than people are. It is near impossible to know that a person returned to their country of origin has reached safety.

However, my concern during the debate was to draw attention to the specific problems occurring during the deportation process. A case had been brought to my attention of a Cameroonian woman who alleged that during deportation she was assaulted by members of a private escort team contracted by the Home Office. Once she reached Cameroon she was so badly injured the Cameroonian immigration officials refused to allow her entrance to the country. The deportation was abandoned, she was flown back to Heathrow and immediately taken to hospital traumatised, and was treated for severe genital bleeding and multiple bruising.

While it would appear that this must be an isolated case, asylum rights organisations and groups that visit detention centres hear allegations of abuse every day. Back in 2004 the Medical Foundation published a report in which they argued that the use of gratuitous force and assaults on detainees were systematic within the deportation process. They showed how the UK’s obligation under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights means there is no justification to the use of unnecessary force during deportation. They made recommendations to the Home Office to improve the capacity for investigation abuses.

Needless to say three years later the Home Office still do not give automatic medical examinations for any individual who is the subject of a failed deportation attempt, they do not allow victims to stay in the country in order that allegations may be investigated properly and there are still questions to be asked about the quality of training removals officers receive.

The problem of mistreatment starts with the Home Office contracting out services to private security companies. At present, most of the deportation work is done by the infamous Group 4 Securicor. A rudimentary delve into the recent history of the company finds that the company’s management of a juvenile detention centre was criticised by the Youth Justice Board for its overuse of dangerous restraint techniques. Eight short-term immigration holding facilities managed by the company were condemned by the Chief Inspector of Prisons for being inadequate, inhumane and for holding detainees in facilities described by staff as ‘dog kennels’. The Inspector said that immigrants were treated ‘as though they were parcels, not people, and parcels whose contents and destination were sometimes incorrect’.

This does not seem to me to be a company competent in carrying out deportations and running immigration detention centres. There must be some relationship between under-trained, underpaid private security personnel and allegations of abuse. There must also be a relationship between the culture of targets that has infiltrated the deportations process and the way in which those being detained are treated. If we must deport people, we must put safeguards in place to ensure deportees are treated as people not parcels.