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
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
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.
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
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.
