In 2018, the Trump administration initiated a “zero‐tolerance” border policy wherein they criminally prosecuted all individuals who were apprehended crossing the border without proper authorisation. The policy change resulted in numerous migrant children being separated from their parents. In an article for Symbolic Interaction, GDP advisor Matthew Flynn and Eric O Silva (both of Georgia Southern University) examine each side’s aligning activity through a qualitative content analysis of 1,500 YouTube comments made in response to CNN and ProPublica news coverage. […]
Publications & Events
Cayman Islands Detention Data Profile (2020)
Cayman Islands Detention Data (2020) The latest detention-related data from the Cayman Islands, including immigration and detention-related statistics, domestic laws and policies, international law, and institutional indicators. View the Cayman Islands Detention Data Profile Related Reading: Cayman Islands: Country Page Cayman Islands: Statistics and Data […]
NEWSLETTER: Penalising People in Need, from Korea to the Caribbean to the Netherlands
OUR LATEST PUBLICATIONS Immigration Detention in the Republic of Korea: Penalising People in Need of Protection Over the last two decades, South Korea has implemented increasingly restrictive asylum and migrant worker policies. The government does not provide adequate data about detention, making it challenging to assess trends in the country, but observers report that this […]
Immigration Detention in the Netherlands: Prioritising Returns in Europe and the Caribbean
The Netherlands places increasing numbers of foreigners—including asylum seekers, families, and children—in detention. The country’s Caribbean territories—specifically, Aruba and Curaçao—have also ramped up their removal efforts in recent years as thousands of Venezuelans have sought refuge on the islands. […]
Prison for Profit
On 7 March, GDP Director Michael Flynn joined Abdul Aziz Muhamat (2019 Martin Ennals Prize Winner), Ilse Van Velzen (filmmaker), Ruth Hopkins (investigative journalist), Agnès Callamard (UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and Director of “Freedom of Expression”), and journalist Luc Hermann to discuss the privatisation of prisons and administrative detention in […]
Submission to the Working Group on Discrimination against Women in Law and Practice: Romania
Submission to the Working Group on Discrimination against Women in Law and in Practice (WGDW) in preparation for its visit to Romania on 24 February to 6 March 2020. The Global Detention Project (GDP) is an independent research centre based in Geneva, Switzerland, which investigates the use of detention as a response to international immigration. […]
NEWSLETTER: Immigration Detention in Austria
OUR LATEST PUBLICATIONS Immigration Detention in Austria: Where the Refugee “Crisis” Never Ends Austria’s domestic politics have been heavily influenced by a divisive debate over the treatment of migrants and refugees. This has had an important impact on the country’s immigration detention practices. Despite years of declining detainee numbers prior to the onset of Europe’s […]
Immigration Detention in Austria: Where the Refugee “Crisis” Never Ends
Austria’s domestic politics have long been overshadowed by a divisive and bitter public debate over the treatment of migrants and refugees. This has had an important impact on the country’s detention practices. Despite years of declining detainee numbers prior to the onset of Europe’s short-lived refugee “crisis,” the increase in asylum applications that the country experienced during 2015-2016 became a cause célèbre for resurgent xenophobic political forces, who used the issue to rally support for numerous controversial policies and agendas. These developments have translated into persistent increases in detention numbers long after the “crisis” ended and asylum applications began to plummet to their lowest levels in years. […]
Physical Fences and Digital Divides: Final Report of the Global Detention Project Special Investigation into the Uses of Electronic Media in Today’s Migration Journeys
The “refugee crisis” helped spur a “tech turn” in how people travel across borders and how governments and others respond to these movements. Everyone from civil society organisations—including the Global Detention Project—and individual activists to humanitarian technologists, government officials, and international bureaucrats have experimented with social media and other new forms of digital technology to […]
Crossing a Red Line
“Crossing a Red Line” is the final report of the Red Line Project, a collaborative initiative led by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee that was aimed at documenting the shift from “reception” to “detention” in EU border regions and the implications of this shift on asylum seekers. The project also counted on the participation of the Global Detention Project, the Bulgarian Foundation for Access to Rights, the Greek Council for Refugees, and the Italian Council for Refugees. […]