Over on the Migration Pulse blog for Migrants’ Rights Network, Eiri Ohtani of the Detention Forum reflects, post-election, on the campaign to challenge the indefinite detention of migrants in the UK.

In Immigration detention: the campaign you can’t keep locked up, Eiri writes that we have plenty of reasons to continue our advocacy work –  for almost the first time, there is momentum and space for detention reform in the UK.

The mass incarceration of migrants continues, damaging untold number of people’s lives. The UK is the only country in Europe to detain migrants indefinitely. Untold numbers have suffered under this system, many have died.  In the lead up the election, persistent campaigning and lobbying saw some real advances and made fundamental reform of detention, not just tinkering with the system, a real possibility. There were manifesto commitments which, while not going as far as we would like, would have released many from detention and would have been a significant step towards arguing for an end to detention altogether. And then the election happened, with the election to government of the only major party which had not committed to detention reform.

How did we get so close, and where do we go from here?

Read Eiri’s thoughts here.