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About Jerome Phelps

Jerome Phelps is Director of Detention Action ( formerly London Detainee Support Group), where he has worked with immigration detainees for eight  years.  Detention Action is a small grass-roots charity, providing emotional support and non-immigration advice to immigration detainees in the London area, particularly at Harmondsworth and Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centres.  He is the lead author of the report "Detained Lives: the real cost of indefinite immigration detention".

Articles by Jerome Phelps

Is there an alternative to locking up migrants in the UK?

Jerome Phelps 15 April 2013

If detention is a tool of war on irregular migration, then the damage on both sides is severe. But this war is not inevitable. There is a significant area of potential common interest in a fair system that works primarily by consent

The lonely death of Jimmy Mubenga

Jerome Phelps 14 October 2011
The man shouting for help was a deportee, a figure hopelessly removed from the mundane normality of international flight. An unbridgeable gulf separated him from the passengers sitting in front of him and across the aisle. Jimmy Mubenga's role was to be a non-person, to disappear from the UK and be forgotten

Fast track to despair

Jerome Phelps 11 May 2011
In the UK, people lose their liberty simply for claiming asylum. On the 60th anniversary of the Refugee Convention, which enshrined the right to seek protection from persecution, it is worth reminding ourselves of how far we have fallen from those aspirations.

"A lifer is better than a detainee"

Jerome Phelps 14 September 2010
Immigration detention is a clear example of the gap between toughness and effectiveness. It's not too late for the coalition government to take on the extremely expensive pain of the wholesale detention of migrants

No release: lives in limbo

Jerome Phelps 10 May 2010
The UK is almost alone in Europe in detaining migrants indefinitely. The cost to the taxpayer does not come cheap. The costs to detainees are incalculable. But in the long term, the most serious damage may be to the British tradition of defending civil liberties from arbitrary state power.

This week's editor

Heather McRobie


Niki Seth-Smith is a freelance journalist and co-editor of OurKingdom.

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