With the recent tragic surge in the number of deaths at sea of asylum seekers and other migrants attempting to reach Europe, enormous public attention is being focused on the treatment of these people across the Mediterranean. An important migration policy employed throughout the region is detention, including widespread deprivation of liberty of asylum seekers […]
European Union
University of Athens
On 20 March Izabella Majcher presented a paper titled “Immigration Detention under EU Law and International Obligations of Member States” at the conference “Regulating ‘irregular’ migration: International obligations and international responsibility,” held at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. […]
Odysseus Conference
On 6 February 2015, Mariette Grange chaired the session “Introducing the notion of alternatives to detention in the EU policy-making” at the final conference of the Odysseus Network’s “Made Real” Project, “Alternatives to Immigration Detention in The EU: The Time For Implementation,” which was held at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. […]
Ressortissants étrangers retenus en vertu de la législation relative à l’immigration (relatif à la visite effectuée 2015 au Luxembourg par le Comité européen pour la préventionde la torture et des peines ou traitementsinhumains ou dégradants (CPT)
1. Remarques préliminaires (Read full CPT report)100. Lors de ses précédentes visites, le CPT a examiné à plusieurs reprises la situation deressortissants étrangers privés de leur liberté, notamment dans le centre de séjour provisoire pourétrangers en situation irrégulière situé au Centre pénitentiaire de Luxembourg (voir paragraphe 32).Le CPT se félicite que, conformément à ses précédentes […]
Discipline and Punish? Analysis of the Purposes of Immigration Detention in Europe
Pre-removal detention is usually considered an administrative measure aimed at the facilitation of the removal of irregular migrants by preventing them from absconding during removal proceedings. The administrative nature of immigration detention implies that persons subject to this measure do not have access to the fair trial guarantees that criminal detainees are entitled to. However, the assessment of pre-removal detention under European Union and Swiss legislation demonstrates the penal nature of such detention despite its formal administrative classification.
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The EU Returns Directive and the Use of Prisons for Detaining Migrants in Europe
Can immigration detainees be held in prisons? Can they be confined alongside ordinary prisoners? On 17 July 2014, in its decisions on the joint cases of Bero & Bouzalmate and the case of Pham, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) rendered its opinion on these practices. […]
Human Rights Violations during EU Border Surveillance and Return Operations: Frontex’ Shared Responsibility or Complicity?
As the International Law Association highlights “[power] entails accountability, that is the duty to account for its exercise.” Against this background, the article focuses on the question of accountability of the European Union (EU) border agency Frontex for potential human rights violations that may occur in the course of its operations. The article aims to […]
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. […]
