The right to personal liberty is one of the oldest recognized rights in liberal democracies, which raises fundamental constitutional questions about the use of detention as an immigration measure. However, as this GDP Working Paper highlights, in common law countries, lengthy immigration detention on a large scale has become the norm and is largely regarded as constitutional. […]
Australia
Challenges to Providing Mental Health Care in Immigration Detention: Global Detention Project Working Paper No. 19
The global expansion of immigration detention creates an imperative for the mental health community to develop specialized models of care. The authors employ lessons learned from their experiences in Australia to provide a framework for understanding the corrosive nature of immigration detention and suggest clinical approaches that may be adapted to assist detainees in developing resilience to such settings.
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Capitalism and Immigration Control: What Political Economy Reveals about the Growth of Detention Systems: GDP Working Paper #16
Assessments of the political economy of detention point to a key challenge that is common to countries across the globe: how economic insecurities of host population’s translate into xenophobia and ethno-nationalist demands for more deportations, detentions, and walls. […]
Engaging Governments on Alternatives to Immigration Detention
A leading organizer of the global effort to promote alternatives to immigration detention explores advocacy strategies for spurring detention reforms and the rationale behind the alternatives campaign. […]
Immigration Detention in Nauru
Nauru operates a controversial offshore processing centre for Australia that accommodates asylum seeking men, women, and children. The facility, which is part of Australia’s “Pacific Solution,” has been the focus of global condemnation because of the mistreatment of detainees, high profile cases concerning the detention of children, and Australia’s long track record of employing policies […]
The Plight of Children and Women Seeking Asylum in Australia
Mariette Grange served as a panelist at this side event to the UN Human Rights Council. The event was organized by Edmund Rice International, Franciscans International, Destination Justice, and ChilOut. Other panelists included Phil Glendenning, Refugee Council of Australia; Mohammad Ali Baqiri, former detainee at the offshore detention centre in Nauru and the 2015 ChilOut Youth […]
There and Back Again: On the Diffusion of Immigration Detention
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. […]
How and Why Immigration Detention Crossed the Globe
This paper details the history of key policy events in various countries that led to the global diffusion of detention practices during the last 30 years and assesses some of the motives that appear to have encouraged this phenomenon. In telling this story, this paper seeks to flesh out some of the larger policy implications […]
