The British Home Secretary, Mr David Blunkett, has won a significant victory over a High Court ruling on the detention of asylum seekers which threatened the government's fast-track immigration policy.
The Court of Appeal yesterday allowed Mr Blunkett's appeal against a judgment by Mr Justice Collins which would have resulted in the release of hundreds of asylum seekers from the government's flagship immigration centre at Oakington, Cambridgeshire, and opened the state to multi-million-pound compensation claims by asylum seekers claiming unlawful detention.
The three Appeal Court judges held the Home Secretary's policy of detaining asylum seekers for seven days to process their applications was lawful under both the Immigration Act and the European Convention on Human Rights. The Home Secretary had argued a short period of detention could be justified where it would speed up a decision on whether asylum should be granted.
Lord Philips said that in restricting detention to such circumstances Mr Blunkett may well have gone beyond what the European Court would require but that they were content he should have done so.
"The vast majority of those seeking asylum are aliens who are not in a position to make good their entitlement to be treated as refugees," he said. Nonetheless the court believed "most right thinking people would find it objectionable that such persons should be detained for a period of any significant length while their applications are considered, unless there is a risk of their absconding or committing other misbehaviour."
Lord Philips said constraints on powers to detain aliens did not result from articles of the European Convention: "They result from a recognition, that is part of our heritage, of the fundamental importance of liberty."
Lawyers for the four Iraqi Kurds who appealed against their detention at Oakington - who were given leave to appeal to the House of Lords - said the effect of yesterday's decision was "to greatly extend the Home Office's powers of detention."