Articles, blogs, books, chapters, op-eds, and other publications written by Global Detention Project staff members and advisers for journals, partner organisations, scholarly collaborations, or media outlets.
We should be shocked that so many countries fail to provide even basic details about their immigration detention practices. And yet, for those who have worked on this issue over the last two decades, the absence of public accountability about detention comes as no surprise.
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Liberal democracies betray discomfort at public scrutiny of immigration detention, neglecting to release statistics, cloaking detention in misleading names, and limiting what they define as deprivation of liberty. These countries have also expanded their detention activities and encourageed their neighbors to do the same. What explains this simultaneous reticence towards and embrace of detention?
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Research undertaken by the Global Detention Project indicates that an often over-looked variable shaping detention policies and practices is the response by states to pressure stemming from key international norms relevant to the rights of non-citizens, including the right to liberty and security of the person. Available here. […]
In its ruling in the Skerdjan Celaj case (C-290/14), rendered on 1st October 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) addressed once again the relation between immigration and criminal law and in particular the compatibility of national penal measures imposed as a punishment for irregular migration with the EU Returns Directive.
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Pre-removal detention is usually considered an administrative measure aimed at the facilitation of the removal of irregular migrants by preventing them from absconding during removal proceedings. The administrative nature of immigration detention implies that persons subject to this measure do not have access to the fair trial guarantees that criminal detainees are entitled to. However, the assessment of pre-removal detention under European Union and Swiss legislation demonstrates the penal nature of such detention despite its formal administrative classification.
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Can immigration detainees be held in prisons? Can they be confined alongside ordinary prisoners? On 17 July 2014, in its decisions on the joint cases of Bero & Bouzalmate and the case of Pham, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) rendered its opinion on these practices. […]
As the International Law Association highlights “[power] entails accountability, that is the duty to account for its exercise.” Against this background, the article focuses on the question of accountability of the European Union (EU) border agency Frontex for potential human rights violations that may occur in the course of its operations. The article aims to […]
From Mexico to the Bahamas, Mauritania to Lebanon, Turkey to Saudi Arabia, South Africa to Indonesia, Malaysia to Thailand, immigration-related detention has become an established policy apparatus that counts on dedicated facilities and burgeoning institutional bureaucracies. Until relatively recently, however, detention appears to have been largely an ad hoc tool, employed mainly by wealthy states in exigent circumstances. This paper uses concepts from diffusion theory to detail the history of key policy events in several important immigration destination countries that led to the spreading of detention practices during the last 30 years and assesses some of the motives that appear to have encouraged this phenomenon. […]
