Human Rights, Refugee Protest and Immigration Detention

Lucy Fiske

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137580955
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137580962
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Law

This book builds a compelling picture of injustices inside immigration detention centers, within the context of the rise of the use of immigration detention in the Global North. The author presents the rarely heard voices of refugees, bringing their perspectives to light and personalising and humanising a global political issue.

Based on in-depth interviews with formerly detained refugees who were involved in a wide range of protests, such as sit-ins and non-compliance, hunger strikes, lip sewing, escapes and riots, Human Rights, Refugee Protest and Immigration Detention presents a comprehensive insight into immigration detention and protest.

Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt, the book challenges contemporary human rights discourses which institutionalise power and will be a must-read for scholars, advocates and policymakers engaged in debates about immigration detention and forced migration.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Lucy FiskeHuman Rights, Refugee Protest and Immigration Detention10.1057/978-1-137-58096-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Lucy Fiske¹

(1)

University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia

End Abstract

* * *

Especially after a protest, I would feel proud of myself. Cos I did something that every free man would do. You know? You are not dead body. You are human, you have got dream. So when you do those things and you come back to your room and think ‘Oh that was good.’ Even if we didn’t achieve what we wanted, like talking with Immigration or bring Immigration to see us, but at least you feel like the things inside your chest come out. It’s better than inside, you get sick. You feel a little bit open and relax, until the next action.

Osman, detained 3 years and 4 months

* * *

… in detention we had very well educated people. We had politicians, we had pilots and they knew how to deal with protests and everything. So there were the people that says ‘Okay. We do it peacefully. We sit here,’ and there were the people who said ‘Peacefully doesn’t answer anything because there is no journos here. We need to get journos here.’ And how we can do it just go to a town and sit in there until journos gets here. Or just burn the place down and the smoke will bring journalists, you know? … We had lots of well educated people who could get their heads around policies and politics and everything. They played it well. We played it like politicians. … So all the demonstrations and all the protests we did, there was a great reason behind it. It wasn’t just like ‘we are bored and let’s break something.’

Issaq, detained 3 years and 11 months

* * *

As the use of immigration detention has proliferated around the globe, so too has the academic literature addressing the practice. Immigration detention has generated a broad and rich body of literature spanning law (Goodwin-Gill 1986; Hailbronner 2007; Hamilton 2011; Kalhan 2010; Stevens 2013), sociology (Marfleet 2006; Nethery and Silverman 2015; Story 2005), criminology (Grewcock 2009; Malloch and Stanley 2005; Pickering 2005), psychology and psychiatry (Robjant et al. 2009; Steel and Silove 2001), politics (Nethery et al. 2012; Sampson and Mitchell 2013) and cultural studies (Pugliese 2007; Wolfram Cox and Minahan 2004 ) to name a few. Much of this literature focuses on the practices of the state and considers ‘the refugee’ in abstract form, as a passive, interchangeable object caught in an extraordinary exercise of state power. The refugee is at once a concern as the victim of human rights violations, yet is not present in any distinct or recognisable form. While there is a discernible consensus among writers, advocates and human rights bodies that immigration detention presents serious challenges to human rights (in law, ethics and politics), very few turn to those subjected to detention as a means of furthering our understanding of the troubling practice. Very few works engage with detained refugees as agents in the exercises of power or the challenges to human rights that immigration detention entails.

This book takes accounts of formerly detained refugees as the entry point for analysis of the detention of refugees and its implications for human rights. It looks at immigration detention at a specific and localised level. It examines the daily individual interactions and social relations occurring within detention centres in Australia, taking formerly detained refugees as key sources of knowledge. By taking a detailed approach to immigration detention and refugees’ resistance to it, I hope to generate new insights into understandings of the global figure of ‘the refugee’ and human rights. Refugees occupy a critical position in human rights theory and practice, both exemplifying why human rights remain utterly necessary and exposing the failings of modern human rights institutions. Through in-depth interviews with refugees who protested against their incarceration in immigration detention centres, this book moves between the micro (daily relations inside detention) and the macro (political, legal and theoretical frameworks which enable or contest detention) to stimulate new ways of thinking about detention, refugees and human rights.

The use of immigration detention is on the rise globally. More than one million people pass through immigration detention centres in the USA, Canada, Australia, and Europe each year. They may be held in over-crowded, dilapidated detention centres or in modern, purpose-built facilities designed as ‘super-max’ prisons, allocated an identification number, subjected to arbitrary rules and sometimes arbitrary and excessive use of force, distanced from legal protections by their incarceration, lack of knowledge, little political voice and their status as non-citizens, non-people. Life inside immigration detention centres is precarious, filled with uncertainty and monotony and, too often, with degrading treatment. As the use of immigration detention has risen, so too has detainee protest. When detainees go on hunger strike or riot or occupy the roofs of detention centres, their actions are usually narrated by governments keen to discredit them and their actions as criminal, manipulative and evidence of ‘their’ barbarity and difference. A secondary, counter narration is provided by detainee supporters who explain the actions as evidence of detainees’ distress and deteriorating mental health. The voices of the actors themselves, people held in detention and taking protest action, are rarely heard in any depth.

The separation of detained refugees’ narrations from their actions rests upon a distancing of the refugee from the citizenry. The less contact that ‘ordinary citizens’ have with detained refugees, the less likely they are to have access to refugees’ own explanations of their actions. Indeed, governments practicing immigration detention often go to great lengths to obstruct, if not entirely prohibit, contact between detained refugees and citizens, thereby retaining greater control over the narrative used to frame asylum seeking and the need for immigration detention. Detention both enables, and is itself enabled by, the distance between asylum seekers and citizens.

The dominant narrative surrounding refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, Europe, Australia and North America is one in which the refugee is viewed either as a victim or as a villain. Possible responses are consequently narrowed to charity or hostility. Most commonly, the (real) refugee appears in fund-raising campaigns as a familiar image of a poor, visibly needy, brown-skinned woman or child (e.g., see Malkki 1996 or Rajaram 2002), whereas asylum seekers are more commonly represented as lawless, unknown and threatening males (e.g., see Aas 2007; Pickering 2005 or Philo et al. 2013). The dominant hegemony provides only a simplistic binary for understanding a complex and dynamic phenomenon involving real people. This hegemony needs to be challenged and unsettled; it has philosophical, ideological and moral limitations and, further, it is a worldview which results in material harm and injustice—for asylum seekers and others ‘here’ as well as for refugees in lands far away.

Both humanitarian and criminalising discourses draw upon archetypal figures and, as established discourses, easily overwhelm the voices of refugees in detention centres. Refugees are popularly seen as passive victims, and any display of agency or assertion of political identity risks their being recast as suspect—the ‘cheating, conniving, manipulative, dishonest person out to subvert the aid system’ (Harrell-Bond 1999, 153). The power of these archetypes effectively precludes any chance of detained refugees’ protest actions being read as legitimate responses to injustice. In addition to governments’ and refugee supporters’ greater public voice and access to media, explanations for refugee protest against detention that reduce actions to simple criminality or despair are readily digested by the nation’s population. As demonstrated by Issaq and Osman earlier, however, protest holds many layers of significance: deliberate actions aimed at particular goals, existential functions to express agency and, sometimes, catharsis to relieve the pressure of detention. Most importantly, their testimony reveals conscious agents analysing their situation and disputing the ethics and efficacy of possible actions. All of which are obscured in external narrators’ explanations of refugee protest.

This book attempts to intervene in the dominant hegemony surrounding refugees and to unsettle the polarised discourse in which asylum seekers and refugees are to be either feared or saved. The work is based on a series of lengthy, in-depth interviews with fifteen refugees who had been previously detained in Australian detention centres. The fifteen participants were all men and came from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Jordan. One person was stateless. The men had been held in detention for periods ranging from seven months to six years, and between them, had been held in every detention centre on Australian territory operating between 1999 and 2005. Most had been held in multiple detention centres during their periods of detention. All had found the experience of detention profoundly offensive and dehumanising and had engaged in protest against it. Beyond agreement on the injustice of detention, the men did not hold a consensus view about protest, as the following chapters reveal. The men were all interviewed after their release from detention, primarily as gaining permission to access detained populations for research of this nature was unlikely to be granted. The research draws on a relatively small sample of formerly detained refugees as it seeks rich qualitative understandings of the experience of immigration detention and the social relations produced there. This book does not make any claims to a new truth, but rather presents previously unexamined experiences and perspectives that enrich our understanding of just how detention works and challenges us to rethink refugees, detention and human rights.

Why This Book?

This book has three aims. First, it provides a platform for refugees subject to immigration detention to speak for themselves, to explain what their experiences of detention were and, particularly, to explain their protests against detention. This leads to the second purpose, to better understand a phenomenon that has grown over the last two decades and is set to become more frequent and more widespread as the use of immigration detention spreads. The use of immigration detention has grown at an alarming rate in the last two decades. As recently as the 1990s, immigration detention was used by only a few states and almost entirely as a last resort, whereas in 2015, almost all states practice immigration detention, creating a global carceral web (Silverman and Nethery 2015, 6). Finally, this book considers what immigration detention, and refugees’ use of human rights in their protest against it, means for human rights—theoretically and practically.

At the time of writing, the world is experiencing the largest refugee flows since World War II. Almost sixty million people are currently displaced from their homes and if gathered together would form the twenty-fourth most populous nation on earth (UNHCR 2015, 2). Some have been refugees for years or decades, such as Afghans and Burmese, but newer conflicts in Syria, Burundi and Ukraine, and escalations of existing conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic have produced millions of newly displaced people. While it continues to be true that the vast majority of refugees remain close to home in neighbouring countries, over one million people entered Europe in 2015, and all except a little more than 50,000 have lodged claims for refugee status (BBC 2016). The numbers of people entering Europe have overwhelmed sophisticated border protections and Europe’s extensive immigration detention capacity. It is difficult to conceive of a world in which there are no refugees, with no one crossing borders without prior authorisation and proper travel documents.

Extra-judicial, administrative immigration detention has been the ascendant trend in response to unauthorised crossing of borders throughout Refugee Convention signatory countries. Chapter 7 outlines the rapid expansion of immigration detention in Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, including the more recent phenomenon of extraterritorial detention—intercepting and detaining would-be asylum seekers before they reach a signatory country. The EU funds detention centres in Ukraine, the USA in Mexico and Australia in Indonesia, interrupting refugee journeys and holding them outside the potentially protective embrace of western liberal democratic states’ legal systems. Immigration detention is an administrative practice deployed against non-citizens. It is not subject to the same ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. ‘We Are Human.’ Re-humanising Human Rights
• 3. Power and Resistance. Everyday Resistance to Immigration Detention
• 4. Escape
• 5. Hunger Strike, Lip Sewing and Self-harm
• 6. Riot
• 7. Immigration Detention Globally
• 8. Conclusion
• Backmatter