In her keynote speech to the Legal Aid Practitioners Group conference last month (see opposite), Liberty director Martha Spurrier highlighted the plight of the over 30,000 immigrants a year who are held in indefinite detention in the UK. She told the conference that these people ‘haven’t broken the law, they’re not serving criminal sentences’ but that they ‘don’t know how long they are going to be detained for. They are there for the sheer convenience of the state’.