Restoring the right to breathe: Migration detention must end

The COVID-19 pandemic has yet again rendered visible the harmful and obsolete nature of migration detention. It is time to end it.

“Ellebæk has been used by police to humiliate, segregate and racially profile people who came to ask asylum. We who have been locked up in Ellebæk, were not criminals for your information, even though the police treat us like we are criminals.” These are the words of Andrew, who was twice imprisoned for eleven months and one month respectively in the Danish migration detention centre Ellebæk, which the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture has called among the worst of its kind in Europe. Andrew’s testimony of discrimination and degradation resonates with criticism voiced by people held in migration detention camps in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe. As detention visitors and advocates for detainees’ rights, researchers, and people who experienced incarceration first-hand, we find it imperative that this criticism is taken seriously and that the systemic harms of detention are addressed. Migration-related detention has become a standardised instrument used by states to regulate undesired mobility. It entails the incarceration of people who have not committed any crime but who, as Andrew observes, are racially profiled and criminalised for who they are.