The Children’s Commissioner for Wales Keith Towler has condemned the “shocking” treatment of asylum seeker children in the UK.
Mr Towler said the way some children were dealt with beggared belief, according to today’s Western Mail.
He went on to describe the highly distressing way one young family was recently removed from Swansea. He is the latest in a long line of people to speak out on the issue this year.

There was a predictable outcry when the Welsh Assembly Government decided recently to allow asylum seekers, who have been refused permission to stay in the UK, access to hospital treatment.
It was the usual knee-jerk reaction. One has to wonder what these people would do if they came across someone in pain, or suffering a life-threatening illness, but who they suspected to be from abroad.
Would they check first whether they should be ‘here’, whether they pay their taxes?The Tories, as Betsan Powys of the BBC, pointed out, got very confused over the new policy.
Obviously, they didn’t want to appear soft on foreigners – heaven forbid – but the true blues are a little wet over this side of Offa’s Dyke, a little too caring.
Today, in an excellent letter to the Western Mail, Cathy Owens, programme director for Amnesty International in Wales, describes the “outrage from the usual quarters about queue-jumping and fairness for British taxpayers”.
Some of this is based on valid argument, she says, but some is based on “misinformation and xenophobia”.
Asking readers to put themselves into the shoes of some of the 3,000 asylum seekers in Wales – many of whom have fled repression and war – she says: “A few hundred may not win the right to stay, but may find it very difficult to return – they may not be able to travel back to Afghanistan, Darfur or Zimbabwe.”
If they fall ill, they can go to a GP but cannot be treated as inpatients at hospital.
Last year, only 11 people in this situation needed treatment in Welsh hospitals – a small number when you consider that more than 300,000 operations take place in Wales every year.
“For each of those 11 people behind the headlines, it could have been the difference between life and death,” writes Owens.
WAG’s decision was a point of principle – that we don’t refuse help to anyone who is ill or dying. And it was one that makes our nation a little more humane.

The death of cancer patient Ama Sumani will be on the conscience of this nation, according to the Archbishop of Wales.
Ama Sumani, 39, died yesterday in Korle-Bu hospital, Accra, Ghana, after she had been forcibly removed from Cardiff’s University Hospital of Wales in January.
The widowed mother-of-two had been taken from her hospital bed in Cardiff while undergoing treatment because her visa had expired.
The Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, said today: “I am enormously sad to hear of the death of Ama Sumani.
“I believe her death is on the conscience of this nation because we removed her when it was against every humanitarian instinct to do so.
“My thoughts and prayers are with her family.”
:: Ama’s deportation and the treatment of asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants in Wales has been discussed extensively on What Is Wales?

There have been rumours about the housing of asylum seekers at Cardiff Prison.
South Wales Anarchists Gagged! Newsletter and Respectable Citizen have both reported claims that the jail has again been used to make up for a lack of space at detention centres.
Although it’s not a devolved issue I contacted the Welsh Assembly Government about the rumours. A number of assembly members campaigned against the practice when asylum seekers were held in the jail back in 2001 and 2004.
WAG assured me last week that it is not happening. Read more in the current edition of Big Issue Cymru (Jan 13-20).
UPDATE: See ‘comments’ section.

Also, please check out if you can my friend John Gilheaney’s blog Save Llantrisant Post Office.

Should commercial airlines sell seats to allow the Government to forcibly return asylum seekers?
The issue’s been brewing since early last year – but it’s not one airlines themselves are particularly eager to discuss.
Take the case of Veneera Aliyeva.
Veneera settled so successfully in Swansea with her two children that when immigration officers came to take them away, the community campaigned for her.
The campaign continues although, as I write, the family had finally been released from a detention centre by the Home Office pending a possible judicial review. The threat of expulsion from the UK still loomed over them.
If they are forced to return to Azerbaijan they will do so on an airline in seats you or I’d use for our holidays.
Twice the family has been marked down for return, both times on British Midland Airways (bmi) flights from Heathrow.
When I contacted bmi to ask whether it would abandon these flights, it responded with classic meaningless PR.
“bmi is not at liberty to discuss the details of any of its passengers, under the terms of the Data Protection Act, and we do not wish to get drawn into a debate over Home Office policy. I suggest you contact the Home Office for further details of the case you describe.”
Veneera is a 40-year-old ethnic Armenian. Since a war between Azeris and Armenians in the early 1990s tensions have been high. More than 600,000 remain displaced from their homes, according to Amnesty International, despite a 1994 ceasefire.
Veneera is married to an Azeri and kept her own ethnicity secret until she was seen visiting her mother’s grave in an Armenian graveyard.
The harassment began and, according to Asylum Justice, she was beaten and raped.
Campaigners, then, are concerned for her safety if she is made to return.
So note how bmi publicly absolves itself of responsibility.
It says it can’t discuss the fact that Veneera is being flown back to all possible horrors because of the awful DPA – ie, to protect her privacy as a passenger.
Note also the swish of the bat which knocks the issue in the direction of the Home Office.
The airline – whose subsidiary bmi baby flies out of Cardiff International – should take responsibility for its actions. If it is proud to be carrying out government policy then why not say so?
Other airlines who make these flights have previously intimated that they have no choice but to do the Government’s bidding. But the Home Office says they can turn down these unwilling passengers.
In fact, earlier this year XL Airways said it would no longer take part in these flights out of “sympathy for all dispossessed persons in the world”.
Will we be a better country, or bmi a better company, if Veneera and her children are forced somewhere they do not want to go?

:: From Big Issue Cymru, December 27, 2007-January 6, 2008