By Kate Alexander, director of Scottish Detainee Visitors. It’s been a funny few months. Just a month before the beginning of this year’s Unlocking Detention tour of detention in the UK, the Immigration Minister, Robert Goodwill, announced that [...]
Scottish Detainee Visitors asked their volunteer visitors to write a few sentences about a memorable experience they had while volunteering with them - visiting people detained in Dungavel detention centre. They asked them to start with the phrase [...]
In this week of Unlocking Detention, we visited Colnbrook detention centre next to Heathrow airport (and the high-security neighbour of Harmondsworth). https://twitter.com/DetentionForum/status/804977726901854209 https://twitter.com/DetentionForum/status/804986786837450754 https://twitter.com/DetentionForum/status/804622389749411840 https://twitter.com/DetentionForum/status/804618613520941057 https://twitter.com/DetentionForum/status/804388345887371264 https://twitter.com/MIDdetention/status/805087953009700864 https://twitter.com/MIDdetention/status/804640271828914176 https://twitter.com/DetentionForum/status/804653844563042304 https://twitter.com/DetentionForum/status/805014469944426496 https://twitter.com/DetentionForum/status/804731860643446785 The first blog post of the week [...]
This interview with Ali, who is detained in Colnbrook, took place last week and we planned as usual to tweet the Q and A throughout the afternoon on the Friday of Colnbrook week of #Unlockd16. On Friday morning, [...]
By Jon Featonby, parliamentary manager at the Refugee Council and parliamentary lead for the Detention Forum. As Advent began last year, I was in the Houses of Parliament as part of Sanctuary in Parliament II. On that same [...]
Nine months on from the death of Amir Siman Tov in Colnbrook IRC, Michael Goldin reflects on the man he knew. Michael is an alumni of the René Cassin Fellowship Programme who previously worked for the Joint Council [...]
Week 7 of Unlocking Detention saw us virtually visit Yarl's Wood detention centre, perhaps the best known of all the UK's sites of detention. Opened in 2001 at a cost of £100 million, with an original capacity of [...]
This year, the theme of Unlocking Detention is ‘friends and families’ – we’re specifically focusing on the often unreported, or buried, ‘ripple effect’ of indefinite detention and the way this experience can have tragic consequences beyond the individual detained. [...]
This week Unlocking Detention has been ‘visiting’ Yarl's Wood detention centre - perhaps the best known of all the UK's sites of detention, and which will once again be the site of protest on 3 December. Earlier this [...]
By Jess Anslow, Coordinator of Yarl’s Wood Befrienders. Visiting women who are being indefinitely detained in Yarl’s Wood IRC is challenging. It is challenging because you witness injustice. Injustice coming from a country that is known and admired across [...]