Point of No Return: The Futile Detention of Unreturnable Migrants

Abstract

This paper is an outcome of the awareness-raising project “A Face to the Story: The issue of unreturnable migrants in detention”, which has been made possible by the support of EPIM, the European Programme on Integration and Migration. The project runs from September 2012 to February 2014, and involves qualitative research based on the stories of 39 unreturnable migrants with experiences of detention in Belgium, France, Hungary or the United Kingdom. The report is the result of a collaboration of Flemish Refugee Action (Belgium), Detention Action (UK), France terre d’asile (France), Menedék – Hungarian Association for Migrants, and The European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), which aims to increase public debate on the detention of unreturnable migrants and to put pressure on governments to use detention only as a last resort.

With this report and the related campaign, we hope to increase momentum amongst policy-makers at national and EU levels to reduce detention and find solutions for unreturnable migrants. Besides informing decision-makers, this report is also intended to stimulate civil societies to give special attention to this group of migrants, who are often living under the radar.

Keywords: immigration detention, migrants, returns, policy-makers