Image courtesy of Campaign to Close Campsfield
The Home Office announced today that Campsfield detention centre will close by May 2019, as part of the detention reform programme announced by the Home Secretary in July 2018 in response to the follow-up Shaw Review.
You can read the Home Office statement here.
Eiri Ohtani, Project Director at the Detention Forum said:
“We are very pleased to hear that Campsfield detention centre will finally close. We would like to pay particular tribute to our member organization, the Campaign to Close Campsfield, which has campaigned for its closure almost since its opening more than 20 years ago.
We also welcome the Home Office’s ongoing detention reform programme, including the work of developing community-based alternatives to detention pilots. We invite the Home Office to involve NGOs, practitioners and, most importantly, migrants with direct experience of immigration detention in this process, to ensure transparency and credibility of any alternatives to detention.
More can be done, however, to further reduce the length and scale of immigration detention by introducing a 28 day time limit. People in immigration detention today do not know when they will be released: this is causing extreme mental distress and harm to individuals and also to their families and communities. We urge the Government to end indefinite detention immediately if they are serious about creating a fair and humane immigration system.”
