Norway’s immigration detention Supervisory Board has criticised practices at the country’s Trandum Immigration Detention Centre. In its Annual Report, the board says that although there have been important changes—including shifting medical care from the private to the public sector—numerous abusive immigration detention practices persist, including “prison-like” operations at Trandum, obliging detainees to meet officials from their home countries without their consent, and detaining children.
“Prison-Like” Immigration Detention
According to the Supervisory Board, which is appointed by the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, despite its repeated insistence over several years that “prison-like practices at Trandum must cease,” many necessary reforms have yet to be implemented. In summarising its findings from 2024, the board said that it expected “the Ministry of Justice and Public Security (JD), the National Police Directorate (POD) and the National Police Immigration Service (NPIS) to prioritise improvements in the many issues that have been raised.”
Among the proposed reforms are several that the board adopted after reviewing practices at the Frambois Detention Centre in Geneva, Switzerland, which board members visited in 2023 with assistance from the Global Detention Project (GDP), who helped organise the visit with Geneva’s cantonal immigration authorities (“GDP Assists Norwegian Delegation in Examining Operations at Geneva’s Frambois Detention Centre”). These include:
- Ending police management of the facility;
- Providing detainees more agency in preparing their meals;
- Improving access to digital media;
- Ending carceral practices such as the use of isolation cells and heavily armed staff members, and keeping detainees locked in cells throughout the day.
In addition to the failure to implement these and other recommendations, many of which were also mentioned in a 2018 GDP report commissioned by the Norwegian Red Cross (“Harm Reduction in Immigration Detention”), the Supervisory Board expressed particular alarm over the policy of forcing detainees to meet delegations from their home countries, even in cases where they may be seeking protection. In one case, the board learned that Ethiopian authorities were allowed to hold “interrogation-like meetings with detainees at Trandum” in potential violation of non-refoulement obligations. “The Supervisory Board is deeply concerned that the National Police Immigration Service and the National Police Directorate allow a practice that in reality also means that the detainees’ legal protection is non-existent. The practice must be considered illegal, and it is requested that such meetings are not accepted in the future.”
Among other ongoing concerns, the board highlighted: the “routine locking-down of detainees,” which “has no basis in Norwegian law”; the persistence of invasive body searches, which could be replaced by the use of body scanners; restrictions on the use of cell phones; and failures in transparency, including the refusal by the Ministry of Justice and Public Security to share the results of an assessment of costs and services for removing the police from oversight of the facility.
Immigration Detention of Children
The Supervisory Board devoted an entire section of its report to Norway’s continued detention of children. Children and families are detained at the Haraldvangen Family Centre, which is more than hour’s drive north of Oslo. In addition to violating Norway’s obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, according to the board, child detention cases occur without proper oversight and in a manner the prevents the board from carrying out inspections.
According to the report, “The agreement with the National Police Immigration Service (NPIS) stipulates that the Supervisory Board must be notified when children are to be placed at Haraldvangen. As such notifications are received shortly before placement and deportation, it has been challenging for the secretariat and the members of the Supervisory Board to carry out inspections. It is difficult to avoid this problem as the placement of children at Haraldvangen takes place at short notice and within a short timeframe.”
The Supervisory Board reiterated the recommendation that it had made in previous reports calling for the end of child immigration detention in Norway: “The Supervisory Board emphasises that it considers the deprivation of liberty of children to be problematic in principle. The resource situation and practical needs of the police cannot be given more weight than children’s fundamental rights. The best interests of the child cannot, in light of the strict conditions that apply to detention, be used as an argument in favour of prolonging detention.”
Longstanding Problems and Previous Reform Campaigns
The Trandum Detention Centre has long faced a host of criticisms, particularly for its punitive and restrictive detention regime, which treats detainees as criminals, even though they are not serving criminal sentences. In 2015, for example, Norway’s Parliamentary Ombudsman, which is mandated to visit all places of detention in the country under its remit as the country’s National Preventive Mechanism (NPM), concluded that the facility was placing an “excessive attention to control and security at the expense of the individual detainee’s integrity,” employing the “same security procedures as the correctional services.”
In 2018, the Norwegian Red Cross commissioned the GDP to produce a comparative assessment of detention conditions and operations between Norway and other European countries in order to identify targets for reforms at Trandum. The resultant report, “Harm Reduction in Immigration Detention,” compared detention centres in Norway, France, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland. It found that the carceral model used at Trandum was more extreme than practices in centres elsewhere in Europe, and proposed several “harm-reducing” reforms (both for Trandum and other facilities) including shedding carceral elements in the centre’s operations, internal layout, and design; increasing detainees’ freedom of movement; and ensuring detainees can easily make and receive calls and have access to the internet. Many of these suggestions were subsequently highlighted by the Norwegian Red Cross in a statement urging Norway’s authorities to reform its immigration detention system and were promoted by the Ministry of Justice’s Supervisory Board.
According to the Supervisory Board, in 2022 some of these recommendations were finally initiated, though not fully implemented. Following instruction from the Ministry of Justice, the amount of time for which detainees could be locked in their cells was to be reduced, and they were to be given increased access to outdoor space. The Ministry of Justice also instructed that detainees be given increased opportunities to communicate with the outside world, that health care provision within the centre be provided by Norwegian public health services (rather than a private company), and that detainees face no limitations in accessing care.
However, since then, there have been numerous setbacks and many reforms have failed to be fully implemented, as the Supervisory Board has noted in successive annual reports, including the most recent one. In its 2022 report, the Board already noted the slow pace at which reforms were being implemented, including in particular health care reorganisation, detainees’ continued limitations in communicating with the outside world, lengthy periods of time for which detainees were locked in cells, and the failure to end police management of Trandum. Among the reforms to be finally implemented as of 2024, according to the board, is the shift from private to public health care.
Is Immigration Detention Un-reformable?
The case of Norway’s Trandum detention centre reveals the stubborn resistance to reforms that appears inherent in immigration detention systems, which the Global Detention Project has repeatedly noted in its work.
In an introductory comment to the Supervisory Board’s 2024 Annual Report, board chairman Pål Morten Andreassen offers a quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The House of Dead,” which relates the Russian novelist’s experiences in a Siberian prison camp: “The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” According to Morten Andreassen, this quote equally applies to “how the state takes care of the people for whom it will soon no longer be responsible,” namely immigration detainees awaiting deportation. Morten Andreassen writes: “Unlike prisoners, who serve a sentence in prison, the detainees will not be returned to Norwegian society. Soon they will be out of sight and out of mind for the authorities. In my view, this may make the immigration authorities less proactive and decisive when it comes to safeguarding the rights of detainees and rectifying unsustainable or reprehensible conditions.”
The GDP’s director Michael Flynn has noted a similar problematic in efforts to promote health care reforms in immigration detention centres across the globe. In a 2024 conference paper for the CINETS immigration scholars network, Flynn reported that findings from a 10-year review of scholarly studies and UN reports revealed the “pervasive failure in country and after country to adopt health-related reforms in their immigration detention systems despite repeated recommendations from both official and independent monitoring bodies.” He argued that one possible explanation for this systematic failure is the “distinct nature” of immigration detention, writing: “In contrast to prisons systems, which are at least nominally intended to encourage the re-introduction of prisoners back into society, immigration detention has no such claims to a reform agenda; rather, one of its main purposes is to permanently exclude people from society by ensuring their removal from the country. This fact increases the vulnerability to abuses and as well to official apathy vis-à-vis the implementation of appropriate health care measures.”
Describing immigration detention as being on the “outer limits of the rule of law,” the Supervisory Board’s Morten Andreassen writes that it is essential to establish the “clearest makers” for its operations and practices because “Anything else can create doubts about where the boundary lies and perhaps whether it exists at all.” He adds: “Human dignity must be safeguarded without exception, even if the state gets nothing in return. Both during detention and forced return, the starting point is that foreigners retain their full human rights. As one of the world’s richest countries, Norway should go to great lengths to safeguard the rights of detainees, in my view much further than the authorities do today. Safeguarding fundamental rights is a value in itself, but it is also important in light of the extensive violations that occur globally in connection with detention.”
