New edition of Forced Migration Review by the Refugee Studies Centre examines issues around the detention of migrants and asylum seekers
The latest edition of Forced Migration Review by the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University has been published.
You can read it in full here and you can access all of the individual articles here.
The edition looks at detention, alternatives to detention, and deportation of migrants and asylum seekers.
In the foreword, the editors note that seeking asylum is not an unlawful act, yet asylum seekers and refugees – men, women and even children – are increasingly detained and interned around the world, as are numbers of other migrants.
"Sometimes detained indefinitely and often in appalling conditions, they may suffer not only deprivation of their liberty but other abuses of their human rights too. Families are separated. Medical and psychological needs are ignored. Contact with the outside world is fractured. Rigid rules, surveillance and restraints degrade, humiliate and damage. And lack of information and hope leads to despair," the foreword continues.
The editors say that it will take shifts in attitudes as well as successful pilots, however, for alternatives to detention to become the norm.
Jerome Phelps, Director of Detention Action, examines alternatives to detention in the UK in one of the edition's articles.
Phelps says that Britain is the European Union's biggest detainer of migrants, with detention used heavily in the asylum process. Around 22% of asylum seekers are detained at some stage.
"The UK needs a systemic shift away from enforcement towards engagement with migrants. It is this shift that alternatives to detention can instigate and realise," Phelps argues.