While Canada took measures early on to shrink populations in its dedicated immigration detention centres, people still remain in detention and there are questions about the extent to which immigration detainees confined in prisons have been provided additional safeguards. According to Solidarity Across Borders, as of 16 April the Laval Immigration Detention Center continued to […]
Canada
Canada: Covid-19 and Detention
By the end of March, the overall detainee population in Canada’s three dedicated immigration detention centres had declined significantly. However, like the United States, Canada also makes extensive use of its prison system to hold immigration detainees. The situation of those detainees was not clear as of this update. Globalnews.ca reported on 3 April that […]
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 […]
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 […]
Immigration Detention, the Right to Liberty, and Constitutional Law: Global Detention Project Working Paper No. 22
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. […]
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. […]
The Immigration Detention Puzzle
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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Canada Border Services Agency – Access to Information Requests, 18.04.2013
The Canadian Border Services Agency’s official responses to information requests submitted by the Global Detention Project and Access Info Europe in 2013 as part of a joint project to map access to migration-related detention data in several dozen countries in Europe and North America. The results of the investigation were reported in the joint publication, […]
Immigration Detention in Canada
The Canadian Parliament is currently considering controversial “anti-smuggling” legislation which, if adopted, will “put a lot of emphasis on putting people behind bars before they get due process,” in the words of one member of Parliament. The legislation is part of a larger public debate in Canada regarding its social attitudes and legal responses to […]
