In a response to a call for input from the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment on addressing prison overcrowding, the Global Detention Project (GDP) highlights the use of prisons and other custodial facilities for immigration detention purposes, and urges recommendations to reduce the use of such sites.
Immigration detention assumes many different forms across the globe, and the sites of immigration detention are as diverse as the reasons for such measures. In the European Union, directives require member states to use specialised facilities for confining people who are in immigration return procedures. In many countries, particularly those that do not have well developed legal frameworks for migration-related detention or face surges in the numbers of arrivals, people may be confined in ad hoc detention centres such as abandoned hotels, shipping containers, open air camps, warehouses, or other informal sites. And elsewhere, in the United States, South Africa, Egypt, and Switzerland, for instance—police stations and prison systems have been widely used in addition to dedicated centres.
Because many countries across the globe use prisons to hold immigration detainees–both for administrative and penal reasons–and as immigration detention measures are rapidly expanding across the globe, any proposal to reduce prison overcrowding must call on states to:
- Cease the use of prisons and other criminal justice facilities for the purposes of administrative immigration detention.
- Adopt laws decriminalising infractions related to unauthorised entry or stay in a country.
- Ensure that immigration detention is only used as a last resort, for the least amount of time necessary, only when determined to be absolutely necessary based on grounds provided in law, and prohibited for use in cases involving at-risk groups.
