Consultancy advert: Project Director
22 November 2019 The Detention Forum is seeking an expression of interest from consultants to provide services as a new Project Director. The Detention Forum is an advocacy network of over 40 groups which challenges the UK’s use of immigration detention, founded in 2009. The project is hosted by the [...]
Who gets to ‘imagine better’? – Breaking hierarchies and shifting power on our way to end indefinite immigration detention.
Illustrations by @carcazan Is there an implicit hierarchy of power, even in work and activities intended to create social justice? How do we make that visible? What do we about it? Who ‘gets to’ lead parliamentary advocacy work and why? Why are we afraid of asking such a question? The [...]
When hope is in short supply
Collaboration is all the rage, particularly among groups and charitable foundations who are looking for the magic solution that can achieve social justice – but what does it mean? How do we recognise and address cultural differences which exist between different groups, their priorities and approaches to change making? This [...]
‘I lost my religion, my family and my country, but I found hope’.
Mustapha is a young ambassador on the Red Cross’ Surviving to Thriving project, which supports refugees and asylum seekers aged 11 to 25 in Birmingham, Leeds and Peterborough who don't have parents or guardians in the UK. He described how he ‘stopped feeling’ when he fled Morocco and how he [...]
Impressions of Morton Hall
Morton Hall immigration detention centre is one of the lesser known centres. This blog shares some of the impressions of this particular detention centre which are hard to capture by simply reading monitoring reports. Ali McGinely is Director of AVID, the Association of Visitors to Immigration Detainees, and one of the [...]
My detention clothes
Safiyyah (not her real name) has lived in the UK with her family over ten years. She explains how she was suddenly detained with her sister at a reporting centre, then taken to Sahara Unit in Harmondsworth detention centre and later to Yarls Wood detention centre. My orange dress with [...]
Let’s talk about Tinsley House
While Brook House immigration detention centre has achieved a certain level of notoriety after an investigative BBC Panorama documentary hit the news in 2017, a nearby centre, Tinsley House, is hardly talked about. Mishka, one of the Detention Forum volunteers, spoke to people who know both centres as visitors, to [...]
Welcome to this year’s Unlocking Detention!
In this, our sixth year, many of you will already be familiar with Unlocking Detention. But by way of introduction for newcomers, Unlocking Detention is a ‘virtual tour’ of the UK’s vast immigration detention estate. Using Twitter, Facebook and a website to ‘unlock’ the gates of immigration detention centres, it [...]