Jerome Phelps is the Director of Detention Action, where he has worked with migrants in immigration detention since 2003. Detention Action is a national charity that supports people in immigration detention and campaigns for changes to detention policy. Jerome has written or co-written four reports on detention, including Point of No Return: the futile detention of unreturnable migrants (2014). Follow Detention Action on Twitter: @DetentionAction
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Published in: 50.50Why 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.
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Published in: 50.50Arresting 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.
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Published in: 50.50The Fast Track is deadThe 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.
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Published in: Can Europe Make It?The EU must not leave Greece to solve the migration crisisStill, 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.
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Published in: 50.50After 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?
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Published in: 50.50Interrupting the implacable: fighting the Detained Fast TrackThe 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.