Open letter on Covid-19 to the Home Secretary from Freed Voices
Rt Hon Priti Patel MP Home Secretary Dear Home Secretary, We, Freed Voices, are writing to express our concern regarding the serious risks posed by Covid-19 to those who continue to be held in Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) across the UK. The risk to life in IRCs has been made [...]
The importance of grassroots campaigning in working towards ending immigration detention
Change always requires multiple approaches and multiple actors, ideally working together and acknowledging the value of each other’s methods and successes. In the context of working towards the ending of immigration detention (with major reduction in usage in the meantime), change in the law will ultimately come from MPs and [...]
New: guest blog posts
We are really keen at Detention Forum over the next few months to seek out guest blog posts for our blog to encourage a wider debate to challenge the use of immigration detention in the UK. We will start with our own co-ordination group, those of our members who help [...]
Towards a new theory of change
Over the last decade or so, our theory of change has been really important to us at Detention Forum. In a nut shell, this is a document that we worked on together, which sets out how we thought we could bring about change and challenge the use of immigration detention [...]
Jonathan Ellis will be our new Project Director
We are very pleased to announce that Jonathan Ellis will be our new Project Director. Jonathan has years of experience as an advocacy campaign director, strategist and teacher and has long supported our work. You can read his profile at http://jonathanelliscampaigns.com/about-jonathan/ Jonathan said: “Over the past decade I have admired how [...]
Welcoming the Stranger – a Jewish Perspective to Ending Indefinite Immigration Detention
"You shall not oppress the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9), is a clear principle which offers an opportunity for René Cassin to look at a Jewish perspective to ending indefinite immigration detention. Surrounded by mass immigration and rising cultural division, secure [...]
The silencing of race in NGO and charity campaigning against detention
There are certain norms in terms of how immigration detention can be described. ‘Inhumane’, ‘unjust’, ‘unfair’, ‘harmful’ – but ‘racist’? Gemma Lousley (@gemmalousley) at Women for Refugee Women unpicks why and how NGOs and charity organisations avoid talking about ‘race’ and what its consequences are for anti-detention campaigns. In July [...]
A post-detention Scotland?
With a declining occupancy in Dungavel, the only Scottish detention centre, Kate Alexander, director of the Scottish Detainee Visitors (SDV) is imagining what Scotland would look like post-detention and what it would mean for the visitors who have a well established and effective strategy. At a recent visit to Dungavel, [...]