Suicide

... more than 100 asylum seekers will be freed from detention centres. The Detained Fast Track (DFT) system was introduced in 2000 to fast-track the removal of people with 'very weak or spurious claims'. 

It worked by accelerating legal hearings and appeals while keeping the individual seeking asylum in detention. 

But campaigners warned that people put on the controversial scheme were held in detention centres, which they say are like high-security prisons. 

Now the government has admitted defeat in a long running legal battle over the system after the scheme was branded 'structurally unfair' by the High Court. 

Under the scheme, asylum seekers from a host of 'safe' countries, including as Nigeria, Ghana and Sierre Leone, are automatically put on a special fast-track deportation route because their cases are considered 'manifestly unfounded'. 

They are then transferred to one of the detention centres, and given only seven days to appeal before they are kicked out of the country. 

But last month a judge at the High Court ruled that the rules put asylum seekers 'at a serious procedural disadvantage' and said it 'looks uncomfortably akin to… sacrificing fairness on the altar of speed and convenience'.

The EU should “do its best to undermine” the “homogeneity” of its member states, the UN’s special representative for migration has said. Peter Sutherland told peers the future prosperity of many 

EU states depended on them becoming multicultural. He also suggested the UK government’s immigration policy had no basis in international law. 

He was being quizzed by the Lords EU home affairs sub-committee which is investigating global migration. 

Mr Sutherland, who is non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a former chairman of oil giant BP, heads the Global Forum on Migration and Development , which brings together representatives of 160 nations to share policy ideas. 

He told the House of Lords committee migration was a “crucial dynamic for economic growth” in some EU nations “however difficult it may be to explain this to the citizens of those states”.