Europe, Migrations and the Mediterranean: Human Mobilities and Intercultural Challenges

The 15th IMISCOE Annual Conference took place in Barcelona on 2-4 July 2018. Organised by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the conference brought together the European migration scholarship community to draw attention to geographical dimensions of migration and to provide a forum for methodological discussions linking Mediterranean and migration studies. GDP Researcher Izabella Majcher gave a presentation on data […]

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Submission to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child: Niger

Niger has long been a country of origin as well as of transit. More recently, there has been a steady flow of return migration as well as evacuations from North Africa. In its humanitarian plan for Niger for 2018, UNICEF explains that “Multi-sectoral humanitarian interventions will cover new areas, including those affected by the Malian border crisis and locations registering increasing numbers of vulnerable migrant children returning from Algeria and Libya.” […]

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June 2018 Newsletter

DETAINED ON WORLD REFUGEE DAY   Over the past six weeks, the Trump administration has forcibly taken approximately 2,000 children away from their parents at the U.S-Mexico border. Condemned by the UN as well as by politicians on all sides of the political spectrum, this “zero tolerance” policy has seen children as young as 18 […]

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Children at the Heart of Human Rights

While there is a growing international consensus that the best interests of the child must be respected by ending the practice of child detention, many countries around the world continue to place children in detention facilities. This week, the GDP’s Senior Researcher, Mariette Grange, spoke on the theme of children in detention at the Geneva Summer School […]

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Global Detention Project Annual Report 2017

Throughout 2018, the Global Detention Project’s researchers documented the conditions non-citizens face in detention facilities around the world to ensure that systematic information about the treatment migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers face in detention is made available to advocates and so that governments can be held accountable. […]

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Challenging Migrant Detention: Human Rights, Advocacy and Mental Health

Notions of the unwanted “other,” the “illegal” migrant, and the “bogus” refugee are increasingly prominent in public discourse, lending support to stringent border control policies whereby states are increasingly relying upon the use of detention to control the movement of foreigners. The detrimental impact of these trends on the health and wellbeing of migrants and […]

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Immigration Detention in Canada: Important Reforms, Ongoing Concerns

Although Canada has experienced increasing immigration pressures, including receiving in 2017 the highest number of asylum claims in its history, the country has not witnessed the same acrimonious public debate over immigration seen elsewhere. It has adopted important reforms, including the introduction of a National Immigration Detention Framework aimed at improving detention conditions and reducing […]

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Trandum Police Immigration Detention Centre (from report of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture 2018 visit to Norway)

Trandum Police Immigration Detention Centre (Read full CPT report) 38. The delegation carried out a follow-up visit33 to Trandum Police Immigration DetentionCentre (hereinafter: “Trandum Detention Centre”), which remains the only immigration detentioncentre in Norway.34 The current policy in Norway is to accommodate asylum-seekers only in openreception centres; thus, Trandum Detention Centre functions primarily as a […]

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Protecting the Rights of Migrants: International Norms Facing Contemporary Challenges

GDP Researcher Mariette Grange gave a workshop to government representatives, academics, representatives of international and non-governmental organisations, and representatives of national human rights institutions as part of the “Protecting the Rights of Migrants: International Norms Facing Contemporary Challenges” course in Sanremo, Italy. Organised by the International Institute of Humanitarian Law (IIHL) in partnership with the Organisation Internationale […]

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Immigration Detention in Denmark: Where Officials Celebrate the Deprivation of Liberty of “Rejected Asylum Seekers”

Denmark has pursued increasingly restrictive immigration and asylum policies. During the past three years, the country has adopted some 70 immigration-related amendments aimed at intensifying restrictions, dramatically cut back its asylum recognition rate, and called for detaining as many failed refugees as possible. Observers have repeatedly criticised the penitentiary-like conditions of Denmark’s main immigration detention […]

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