"Human rights and refugee campaigners are calling on the Home Office to be transparent about the numbers of asylum seekers who die in its care by publishing quarterly data as other government departments do. The only way to obtain data about asylum seeker deaths is via freedom of information (FoI) requests to the Home Office, which officials do not always comply with. However, the NHS produces regular figures about deaths in hospitals and the Ministry of Justice does so with deaths in custody."
"Deaths in recent years include those of Leonard Farruku from Albania, who died on the Bibby Stockholm barge in December 2023; Mehrab Omrani from Iran, who is thought to have lain dead for four months in Home Office accommodation before his body was discovered in March 2024; and Hussein Haseeb Ahmed, a Kurdish Iraqi man who died at Manston processing centre in Kent after contracting diphtheria in November 2022."
Campaigners seek quarterly publication of asylum seeker deaths in Home Office care to improve transparency. The only current route to obtain such data is via freedom of information requests, which the Home Office does not always comply with. Other departments, including the NHS and the Ministry of Justice, publish regular death figures. FoI data show 51 deaths in Home Office-provided accommodation in 2024, up 11 from the previous year and more than twelvefold since 2019. High-profile deaths include people found dead after prolonged periods and a fatal diphtheria case. An amendment to mandate publication failed and the ICO sided with the Home Office citing harassment risks.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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