There can be no justification for keeping asylum seekers in prison-like conditions

Editorial: A report into the living standards within the UK’s immigration centres has found highly ’demeaning and excessive’ practices, including the chaining of female asylum seekers to their beds. Such routines, usually involving vulnerable people, must be urgently reviewed and, better still, abandoned

Colnbrook immigration centre, near Heathrow airport (AFP/Getty)

No country likes to have what it sees as its own internal affairs subject to outside scrutiny, even when it has signed up to the international standards that are the subject of the inspection and has done so in the hope and expectation that the same high standards will apply to all. Giving such undertakings is part of being, and being seen as, a civilised state.

So it is disappointing, and in some particular aspects, shocking, that the report, just published by inspectors from the Council of Europe committee on the prevention of torture, found so many concerns to raise from their visits to UK immigration detention sites and two prisons almost one year ago.

Three points might be singled out for particular condemnation.