We hear Privacy International and a few other campaign groups set up camp outside Capita’s AGM in London yesterday protesting Capita’s involvement as an outsourcer in a UK government GPS tracking contract.
The groups, who drove a billboard van to the London shareholders meeting and were distributing leaflets outside, claim the government’s electronic tagging project amounts to “racialized surveillance.” Nasrin Warsame, Policy & Research coordinator at Bail for Immigration Detainees, claimed the outsourcer “facilitates” this by providing services for the Ministry of Justice to track “non-British people – including asylum seekers and people born and raised in the UK.”
Warsame added: “We urge Capita to take a principled stance and make these harmful policies obsolete.”
Privacy International has previously complained that the UK Home Office and the MoJ continue to “throw money at procurement of GPS tags to monitor migrants… despite the fact only 1 percent of migrants abscond from immigration bail,” citing a statistic it obtained via a Freedom of Information request [PDF].
Immigration is dealt with under criminal law, meaning someone accused of breaking the rules, even a person who has never committed a criminal offence, could be fitted with one.
Privacy International told us that “anyone without leave to remain can be tagged, whether they’ve committed a criminal offence or not.”
Lucie Audibert, a lawyer at the organization, added that those who are accused of criminal offences – which she said could “indeed include a breach of immigration laws” – fall under the
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