An important transit and destination country for migrants, Morocco has witnessed significant migratory flows in recent decades. Amongst these flows number thousands of women migrants and asylum seekers, many of whom have experienced abuse and rights violations on their journey to the country. […]
Externalisation
Immigration Detention in Spain: A Rapid Response to Covid-19
On 6 May 2020, Spain reported that for the first time in its history, its long-term immigration detention facilities, “Foreign Internment Centres,” were empty. These centres had long been the target of activists, local politicians, and human rights bodies, who argued that they were unnecessary and abusive. The Covid-19 crisis, which shut down deportation flights, provided a final push. But enormous questions remain. […]
Immigration detention in Italy
As the main European destination for asylum seekers and undocumented migrants crossing the Central Mediterranean by boat, Italy confronts considerable migration challenges. It has responded by ramping up its domestic detention system, implementing the controversial “hotspot” approach to process maritime arrivals, boosting interdiction efforts, and adopting new legal measures that restrict avenues for asylum. The […]
Border Securitization and Containment vs. Fundamental Rights: The European Union’s “Refugee Crisis”
When the “refugee crisis” surged to the forefront of the EU’s agenda in 2015, it did little to discourage the xenophobic wave that swept across member states. It did just the opposite. […]
Sovereign Discomfort: Can Liberal Norms Lead to Increasing Immigration Detention?
Liberal democracies betray discomfort at public scrutiny of immigration detention, neglecting to release statistics, cloaking detention in misleading names, and limiting what they define as deprivation of liberty. These countries have also expanded their detention activities and encourageed their neighbors to do the same. What explains this simultaneous reticence towards and embrace of detention?
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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 […]
Be careful what you wish for
Can the promotion of liberal norms have an unintended – and damaging – impact on how states confront the challenges of irregular immigration? Article for the Forced Migration Review. Read the full article here. […]
Detention at the Borders of Europe: Report on the Joint Global Detention Project– International Detention Coalition Workshop in Geneva, Switzerland, 2‐3 October 2010
On 2-3 October 2010, the Global Detention Project (GDP) held a workshop in Geneva, Switzerland, on migration-related detention that included representatives from organizations in 12 countries in Europe and neighbouring regions, as well as several international migration scholars and advocates. The workshop, which was jointly organized with the International Detention Coalition (IDC), an umbrella group […]
