Today there is a large demonstration taking place against Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre. I've always followed events at Dungavel, ever since I was taken there as a child to see the building. That was twenty years ago. The centre was then just a disused hunting lodge. It was long before the refugees were imprisoned there.

This is how the organisers of the march explain it, 'People imprisoned there feel so desperate that many have tried to commit suicide. They have committed no crime yet are treated like criminals. Across Europe many thousands more are locked up like animals. Their only crime has been to flee war, rape, famine and persecution, seeking safety and freedom. It is the policies of the G8 nations that create these horrific wars and famines that force millions to migrate in the first place.'

I remember a previous march against the detention of refugee children, in autumn 2003. It ended with marchers throwing Weetabix over the giant fences around the site. The background? A mother had been observed stealing breakfast cereal to feed her child. In retaliation, the authorities stopped her weekly allowance of £3.50.

When that happened, a prisoner wrote to the papers, observing that most Scottish jails operated a canteen system, and people were allowed to take food back to their cells to eat later. 'Dungavel is not like a prison', he wrote. 'It is worse than a prison.'

A similar point was made this year by Anne Owers, chief inspector of prisons, who said the situation for children being held at Dungavel, was offensive. The private company responsible for the centre could not even hold detainees in the minimum conditions in which the state insists that imprisoned adults should be held.

In 2004, some 25,000 refugees were held under Britain's special powers system which allows incarceration, imprisonment, or forcible removal. Sometimes you have to stop and remind yourself that the reason why refugees are jailed at Dungavel (and many other centres and prisons) is that they have applied for asylum and been turned down.

A very close friend is just in the middle of an asylum application. He came to Britain from an African country. He is gay, and the country to which the state wishes to deport him is one whose criminal code includes the death penalty for homosexuality.

It is depressing to watch home the Home Office and the courts have dealt with his case. Seven years after his original application, the Home Office wrote him a letter informing him that his asylum claim had been turned down. (The letter was sent when the civil war in his home country entered a brief, temporary ceasefire).

The letter was full of typing errors, it was illiterate and largely incoherent - its argument seemed to be that the Home Office simply did not believe that my friend - for some inexplicable reason - could have come from the country which he said.

My friend then appealed. The case came to an Immigration Tribunal, where the adjudicator accepted that my friend was indeed from the country where he has spent most of his life. On that count, he won. But a new disbelief was now added - despite the presence of his partner in the tribunal - my friend could not in fact be gay.

As the Home Office had previously taken on the right to know more about my friend's nationality than he knew himself, now the Tribunal presumed to insist that they knew his sexual orientation better than he could know it himself.

He has appealed again. Several months ago, he was given the right to appeal. Now he is waiting for an Immigration Appeals Tribunal - so that he can learn what new obstacle the British legal system is going to throw in his path.

If my friend wasn't supported by his partner, other friends, our family, then he would have probably not even dared attempt to appeal. By now, he would be rotting in Dungavel, or in some other refugee prison, waiting to be forcibly deported.

In Scotland there is some recognition that Britain's asylum laws give junior Home Office staff the powers of life and death over people fleeing persecution. There is also a sense that the detention of adults (and even children) in purpose-built refugee prisons is a crime against the democratic claims of the state.

The debate there has even taken on a national tinge. The same English parties whose Westminster representatives wrote these hateful laws, have MSPs in Scotland who are willing to denounce them. The Home Office remains unmoved.

Last year, the man who owns the trees and rents the land all around Dungavel wrote to the Home Secretary - it has not been reported, but I saw a copy of the letter. He did not call into question the legitimacy of the prison, but said simply that it seemed strange to him that we should jail refugee children aged 4 or 5 or 6, while if they had committed any crime - they would certainly not have been placed in prison.

He suggested simply that the children be given the right to leave the prison, briefly for an hour or two, and walk in the surrounding lands - which he owns. If they were supervised, they could not escape. The situation would still be terrible, but the children would at least be allowed some minutes of freedom.

The landowner wrote his MP as well and to other interested parties. The Home Office never even acknowledged his letter.

Close Dungavel Now