A trafficked Vietnamese woman who was placed in detention for three days after arriving at Heathrow airport while experiencing a miscarriage and barely able to stand has received a £50,000 payout from the Home Office, the Guardian has learned.
The Home Office admitted to “clearly significant failings” and has accepted the 33-year-old was detained unlawfully and that the detention constituted inhuman and degrading treatment. The payout is exceptionally high for a three-day period of detention. The Home Office said they have conducted a thorough investigation to prevent anything like this happening again.
The woman arrived at Heathrow on 8 July 2016 when she was eight weeks pregnant as a result of rape in Finland. She started to bleed and informed immigration officials at the airport, which is when she was held for eight hours and subjected to repeated questions.
She was finally taken from the airport to Hillingdon hospital by ambulance. Doctors there thought she should stay in hospital overnight because it was likely she was having a miscarriage. But a decision was taken by the Home Office to put her in detention instead. She said she was not well enough to stand up unaided and had to be assisted to walk out of the hospital.
She was released from detention three days later and it was confirmed that she had suffered a miscarriage. The Home Office finally accepted that she was a victim of trafficking and granted her leave to remain in the UK.
“I felt so bad, I kept being taken to different parts of the airport and asked so many questions by different officials,” the woman told the Guardian. “All I wanted to do was lie on the floor. I kept asking to be taken to hospital because I was in so much pain in my tummy and was bleeding so much.”
The former prisons ombudsman Stephen Shaw called for an “absolute exclusion” on the detention of pregnant women in a report in January 2016. Theresa May, the home secretary at the time, refused to implement an outright ban but said the government was shaping a humane system “that will effectively end the routine detention of pregnant women”.
The government agreed to a time limit of 72 hours to hold pregnant women, with an option to extend this to one week with ministerial authorisation.
Since then, there has been a reduction in the number of pregnant women held, but according to Home Office data 133 pregnant woman have been detained since July 2016.
An internal Home Office investigation into the trafficked woman’s treatment identified significant failings in the way she was treated by officials when she arrived at the airport barely able to stand up.
A heavily redacted internal investigation report by the Home Office’s professional standards unit, seen by the Guardian, states that although officials “genuinely acted in what they felt to be the best interests” of the woman, “the investigation found significant failings in the detention of Ms …, a lack of risk assessment for placing her in detention and a failure to complete detention reviews”.
A box for officials to tick for known medical risks was left unticked and no medical, safeguarding or special needs were logged.
The woman said she was terrified during her ordeal but was too scared to ask any questions. “I thought if I said anything they might put me on a plane and deport me straight away while I was having the miscarriage, so I kept quiet. I was very frightened of my traffickers but I was even more frightened of the Home Office.”
She said she was relieved her case had been settled.
Ugo Hayter, a solicitor at Deighton Pierce Glynn, said: “The amount paid to our client, whilst exceptionally high for a relatively short period of detention, will never make up for the horrific ordeal she was forced to endure at the hands of UK officialdom during that time. The case demonstrates the consequences of the uncaring culture of disbelief that has taken hold of the Home Office.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “We regret that there were clearly significant failings in this case and a thorough investigation has been conducted to prevent such an incident happening in future. The Home Office has clear guidelines which state that pregnant women may not be detained unless under very specific circumstances.”