Dungavel detention of children continues despite promise of pilot scheme

Photo: Gareth Harper

“People were shouting. There were crashing noises. I thought I was in a dream. Four people came in my room, told me get up, get ready. I didn’t know how to make myself dressed. I thought, ‘I’m going to wake up and this is a bad dream’.

“In the living room: my father, my brother in handcuffs. My father is crying. My mother is crying. I never saw my father cry. I told the lady, ‘What is wrong with you? I can’t go to detention. I am 13 and I am going to school today, and why are you putting handcuffs on my father? He is a human being’.

“My brothers were too quiet. They grabbed my dad and took him out of the house. Then my brother, Elvis. He is 18 and very quiet, and he did not want to go in handcuffs but they made him. Then they took me, my mother and other brother. I didn’t want our neighbours to see me.

“I want to come home now.  I was excited to go to school that day… I don’t want to be in Yarl’s Wood. We can’t go out. Too many people are sad. My brothers are quiet, my father and mother are too upset. Someone killed himself here.”

“The time is right to remove nuclear weapons from Scotland”

Photo: Gareth Harper

 

Scotland could invoke international law to block the UK government’s desire to maintain a nuclear arsenal, one of the world’s leading legal experts has stated.

In the run-up to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s 51st anniversary on February 17th, Judge Christopher Weeramantry, former vice-president of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), told an Edinburgh conference that while defence matters are reserved to the UK Parliament, the Scottish Parliament has international humanitarian and legal obligations that weapons of mass destruction violate.

Weeramantry said: “Gross violations of international obligations aren’t excluded from the purview of the Scottish Parliament. The absence of power in the former area cannot cancel out its responsibilities in the latter.”

Management change at Veritas

By Paul McCormack

Napier University’s student newspaper, Veritas, will release its 100^th issue today ahead of the announcement that Editor-in-chief, Allan Berry has resigned.

The news has prompted the Veritas team to consider re-shaping the conventional management practice to a system where four editors have an equal say in the papers decision making process.