Jerome Phelps

Jerome Phelps is Head of Advocacy at Debt Justice (formerly Jubilee Debt Campaign), where he works on debt and climate justice for the global south. He previously worked for 18 years on migrant rights, including as Director of Detention Action and International Detention Coalition. He tweets @JeromeGPhelps

COP27 oferece oportunidade para países pobres exigirem suspensão da dívida

Uma recusa coordenada de quitação de dívidas seria uma ameaça real aos lucros dos países poderosos

By Jerome Phelps

/ 11 Nov 2022

COP27 is an opportunity for low-income countries to demand debt cancellation

OPINION: Wealthy countries’ response to the Global South’s debt crisis has been poor. Is it time for a debt strike?

By Jerome Phelps

/ 7 Nov 2022

COP27 is an opportunity for low-income countries to demand debt cancellation

Why is so much art about the ‘refugee crisis’ so bad?

Even at a celebrity art gala you can don an emergency blanket and feel good about yourself. Hard political questions, not required.

By Jerome Phelps

/ 11 May 2017

Why is so much art about the ‘refugee crisis’ so bad?

Even at a celebrity art gala you can don an emergency blanket and feel good about yourself. Hard political questions, not required.

By Jerome Phelps

/ 11 May 2017

Arresting the mass detention of migrants: ‘Build trust, not walls’

The pragmatic development of alternatives to detention with civil society at the fore can help to arrest the slide into the abyss of mass detention of migrants in Europe.

By Jerome Phelps

/ 12 Oct 2016

The Fast Track is dead

The systematic detention of asylum seekers in the UK has reached the end of the track. The Home Office needs to let go, and invest the savings in a fast, high quality asylum process.

By Jerome Phelps

/ 20 May 2016

The EU must not leave Greece to solve the migration crisis

Still, the boats come. Detention, as a solution to this, would have to be on a scale hitherto unimaginable in the EU. We need alternatives, and migrants need to be part of them.

By Jerome Phelps

/ 12 Apr 2016

The EU must not leave Greece to solve the migration crisis

Still, the boats come. Detention, as a solution to this, would have to be on a scale hitherto unimaginable in the EU. We need alternatives, and migrants need to be part of them.

By Jerome Phelps

/ 12 Apr 2016

After the fast track: what next for the detention of asylum seekers?

UK courts have ruled the routine detention of asylum seekers undergoing accelerated claims to be ‘systemically unfair and unjust’. But faced with hostile politics, how much can strategic litigation deliver?

By Jerome Phelps

/ 14 Dec 2015

Interrupting the implacable: fighting the Detained Fast Track

The UK Court of Appeal will hear an appeal this week over the lawfulness of automatically detaining asylum seekers while their appeals are heard. The era of expansion of this practice is already over and further change is likely.

By Jerome Phelps

/ 27 Oct 2014

A crisis of harm in immigration detention

A young Guinean woman has become the sixth victim in three years of ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’ in UK immigration detention, with the High Court ruling that detention explicitly caused the disintegration of her mental health.

By Jerome Phelps

/ 15 Sep 2014

The lonely death of Jimmy Mubenga

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 b

By Jerome Phelps

/ 10 Jul 2013