Shining a Light in the Darkest of Corners: Revolutionising Immigration Detention Monitoring

Post by Eve Lester and Hayat Akbari.  Eve is an independent scholar and is the Founding Director of boniĝi, a not-for-profit social enterprise, established to develop a digital platform for monitoring conditions in immigration detention and other closed environments. Eve is a Myer Innovation Fellow 2020.  She is the author of Making Migration Law: The Foreigner, Sovereignty and the Case of Australia (CUP, 2018) and more than 50 other articles, book chapters, opinion pieces and organisational research and opinion.  She is also the author of the chapter on the ‘Right to Liberty’ in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law edited by Cathryn Costello, Michelle Foster and Jane McAdam.  Hayat is a Research and Development Consultant with boniĝi and is a member of its Australian Advisory Board. He is a human rights advocate and a former refugee from Afghanistan living in Australia. He holds a BA in International Law and Global Governance and International Relations from Macquarie University. He is the chair of the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN) Youth Working Group and is the Asia Pacific regional focal point at the United Nations Major Group on Children and Youth (UNMGCY).  Hayat advocates for the right of migrants and refugees in immigration detention because of his personal experience. He was held in immigration detention for almost a year.

Globally, immigration detention is one of the most opaque and least accountable areas of public administration.  Its use has grown exponentially over the last 30 years.  Effective monitoring of conditions of immigration detention is vital.  It opens up an otherwise closed and often dangerously secretive world. It increases transparency and accountability.  It helps to make detainees safer and increases pressure on states to use noncustodial alternatives to detention.  It protects some of the world’s most vulnerable people and, quite literally, can save their lives.

Our project at boniĝi began with the idea that we could complement and strengthen the work of official monitors and the tools they use by empowering immigration detainees and those who regularly visit them — whether friends, family, volunteer visitors, or people visiting in a professional capacity — to monitor conditions more frequently, systematically and efficiently.  We imagined a future in which we could use digital technology to develop a 360-degree feedback model of data collection that would capture, triangulate and show clear, credible, accessible and comparable data more comprehensively.  We imagined harnessing the transformative potential of technology to provide a more structured alert system and new insights into patterns and trends in immigration detention practices around the world. 

In the midst of the research and development phase of making this idea a reality, a new reality has turned everyone’s world upside down, not least the world of those living (and working) in places of immigration detention.  COVID-19 requires no introduction, and its impact on populations in immigration detention is undeniable.  While there is no doubt that COVID-19 presents an important opportunity to reimagine migration governance in a more humane and effective way, not least through increased use of alternatives to detention, it has also made the search for creative solutions to the many challenges of monitoring conditions of immigration detention even more pressing.  While in some countries alternatives to detention have been identified and many (and sometimes all) detainees have been released into the community, in others COVID-19 has found its way into the immigration detention system and is wreaking havoc.  Squalid conditions, chronic overcrowding and poor sanitation and hygiene are dangerous incubators of COVID-19, whether in immigration detention centres or closed camps, impacting both detainees and those who staff them.  However, even absent the overlay of squalor and poor hygiene, lack of social distancing, measures such as bans on alcohol-based hand sanitizer, and existing drivers of inequality  make immigration detainees among the most vulnerable to infection.

Only months into the pandemic, we are already seeing that COVID-19 is much more than a short-term problem.  In closed environments like places of immigration detention it has highlighted some serious deficiencies in the way immigration detainees are treated and how issues such as sanitation and hygiene are managed.  It also impacts the enjoyment of other rights fundamental to human dignity, such as communication with the outside world.  The changes to access to immigration detention centres by both lay and professional visitors brought about by COVID-19 will likely have a far-reaching impact on the ability to scrutinise conditions of immigration detention.

So, with a view to making a concrete contribution not only to the immediate policy and practice challenges of COVID-19’s impact on immigration detention but also to enabling us to find the best way of designing a digital platform that meets the longer term needs of a range of users, boniĝi has developed a COVID-19-focused survey.  This particular survey is designed for people who visit places of immigration detention in any capacity. 

If you or others you know visit or have contact with people in places of immigration detention in any capacity, or were doing so pre-COVID-19, we strongly encourage you to take our survey.  It is available in eight languages (English, español, français, русский, دری, 中文, اردو, عربى) and participants can choose to complete the survey completely anonymously.  We can also assure you that the survey data will be safely and securely stored in the EU, in accordance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation, and in compliance with our other privacy obligations.  The full survey takes about 30 minutes to complete.  If you’re pressed for time, you can take the shorter version of the survey, which takes about 15 minutes. The survey will close on 30 September 2020. 

Building a clear data picture of the impact of COVID-19 on immigration detention can only be achieved through a collaborative effort.  We therefore invite and encourage you to work with us to gather the data we need to do so.

Thank you!

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style) 

Lester, E. and Akbari, H. (2020). Shining a Light in the Darkest of Corners: Revolutionising Immigration Detention Monitoring. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2020/09/shining-light [date]