An ever-expanding detention estate: Make your voice heard
By Melanie Griffiths, academic and campaigner. The government has recently submitted plans to the Cherwell District Council for the major expansion of Campsfield House, an Immigration Removal Centre situated just outside Oxford. This is just the latest phase of a wider move towards the expansion of the UK’s immigration detention [...]
Call for a moratorium on the detention expansion – Stop Campsfield Expansion
10 November 2014 As the Home Office plans to more than double the capacity of Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre in Oxfordshire, the Detention Forum is calling for a moratorium on the detention expansion. We call on others to contact their MPs to put a stop to this ill-advised move [...]
How children’s charity Barnardo’s locks up kids with Guantánamo contractor G4S
This article comes from Tom Sanderson. You can read the full article in OpenDemocracy. Britain’s leading children’s charity helps the world’s biggest security company lock up children who have committed no crime. This past summer I’ve been trying to get some answers from Barnardo’s, the children’s charity, about their three-year [...]
Why not everyone can speak out
While the Detention Forum was encouraging groups and individuals to take part in the detention inquiry by submitting evidence, we were contacted by individuals and groups who said they wanted to take part but they simply could not. Room to Heal was one of them, so we asked them to [...]
Psychological weapons used against detainees
This blog post was written by Abdelhay Tali, who has experienced immigration detention, and originally appeared on his blog. This is a thorny issue, through time and the acquisition of experiences; people learned that it is not necessary to do muscular effort and even without talking, one can persuade. In Dover, [...]
Harmondsworth week…
26 Oct to 1 Nov - the Unlocking Detention team looks back on the week they visited Harmondsworth detention centre, right beside Heathrow Airport. Our Harmondworth week started with ominous news, which only confirmed the UK government's commitment to 'Hostile Environment' to make immigrants' lives as difficult as possible. The only [...]
Morton Hall week…
19 to 25 Oct - the Unlocking Detention team looks back on the week they visited Morton Hall detention centre, in deep Lincolnshire. https://twitter.com/DetentionForum/status/524561287024771072 Until recently, Morton Hall detention centre was the latest addition to the ever growing immigration detention estate. Buried deep inside Lincolnshire, we knew that it was pretty isolated. [...]
Not a minor offence: The unlawful detention of unaccompanied children
This piece by Judith Dennis was first published by openDemocracy on 3 November 2014. Judith is Policy Manager at the Refugee Council. Despite pledging to end child detention for immigration purposes in 2010, the UK Government is still quietly locking up children. It’s getting away with it by calling them [...]